As we have just finished celebrating the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and since Black History Month is right around the corner, here is a quote I shared with my Unitarian Universalist siblings at our recent UU MLK Choir Festival held at Pasadena’s Neighborhood Church. It’s a passage from Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

“In other words, I was part of a world. And looking out, I had friends who too were part of other worlds – the world of Jews or New Yorkers, the world of Southerners or gay men, of immigrants, of Californians, of Native Americans, or a combination of any of these, worlds stitched into worlds like tapestry. And though I knew I could never, myself, be a native of any of these worlds, I knew that nothing so essentialist as race stood between us. I had read too much by then. And my eyes – my beautiful, precious eyes – were were growing stronger each day. And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.”