Sunday, April 29, 2018

Kanye And Candace

This made me really happy.


I had a brief, partial rush of the feeling of joy that we would get if we stopped grouping people by race.

If you don't know, Kanye is a famous rapper and Candace Owens is a black, conservative firebrand. One of Candace's big things is that blacks need to get out of the victim mentality because it's mostly rubbish and their lives are dominated by their own behavior, not something someone else is doing to them.

The Sunday previous, I had been at the close of a Catholic women's retreat where the women were sharing what they had picked up from the retreat. One was a black woman who talked about the same kinds of things that a lot of the women do - anxiety, fear and self-doubt and how the weekend had shown her that by recognizing Christ's love and sacrifice for her, she could see herself as loved and valued.

It was beautiful. I wanted to get to know her. I wanted to chat with her about her family and children. I wanted to hear her experiences as a Catholic parent and what she was doing to help her kids navigate a culturally hostile world and tell her my own strategies.

In that moment, we were peers and we could be friends and confidants for life. What Kanye did was to crack open the door, just a little, to a world where we can all be confidants and peers for life instead of being members of our tribes.

I loved it.

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