I admit it. I was wrong.
It bothered me, all this chatter about Biden needing to choose a black woman as his running mate. I wondered why we were again eating our own, we Democrats, holding our candidate's campaign hostage for petty identity politics. I will vote for Joe no matter what, no matter whom he chooses -- any gender, any color, even a tuna fish sandwich, as a reformed Republican claims in a recent ad.
Shame on me. I cannot possibly know how important it is, knowing only, as I do, how unimportant it is to me to have a middle-aged Jewish woman on the ticket. My only connection to the kind of pain American blacks feel is historical -- pictures of gaunt and tortured Jews behind barbed wire fences, grainy videos of people, like me, being shot into mass graves. It happened there, not here. It happened then, not now.
The past few days have been catastrophic, and they have been enlightening. A white policeman squeezed the life out of defenseless black man as the world watched. While the only ones who could have stopped it not only remained silent but even leant a knee, to hold the doomed man's legs down while he gasped for air. We are, collectively, shocked, though we have no reason to be. It has happened before. Often. All too recently. Breonna Taylor. Freddie Gray.
I was not surprised by the ensuing violence, even the torching of a police station. A police station. I wanted to shake my finger at the rioters, remind them that not all cops are bad, and that killing and destruction are not the answers. Well what is, then. If a dying man's desperate cries -- I can't breathe -- are not enough. If each horrific news report is not enough. If a nation's grief is so palpable it draws long quarantined citizens out en masse, blows fears of a deadly pandemic away with the smoldering ashes of a community, will that be enough? I'm guessing not.
An acquaintance, a casual acquaintance about whom I know very little, posted a letter on Facebook today. She was a teacher (I didn't know that). She had quit being a teacher (I didn't know that either). She had taught in the places we privileged people don't go, and had seen the despair, seen the seemingly endless cycle of oppression and poverty and misery that perpetuates itself and leaves an entire segment of the population stuck under our knee, unable to breathe. Having taught only three years, she listed the names of eight of her former students who are now dead. And those, she says, are only the ones she knows about.
I think I empathize, but really, I cannot. I am ignorant, I have no idea what it feels like to live inside black skin. I have no idea what it is to worry, as a black mother worries, that her child will not make it home from school alive. That her teenaged son will be arrested for, well, breathing. Mostly, all I worried about was hurt feelings. Or a little anxiety about a test. Or that somebody else's kid was -- heaven forbid -- smarter than mine.
I was wrong, wrong to think that when there are four eminently qualified and impressive black women on the VP short list, there is some reason not to narrow the search. Pick one of them Joe. We need her ears, her voices, her wisdom. And we need the memories that live in her psyche, and hers alone. We need her to breathe life into a dying nation.
