"America, we have a problem."
So says Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine in the wake of the miscarriages of justice in Ferguson and Staten Island, and so say I. Many people agree, and the question is what to do.
For some time now, major voices in black America have been asking for conversation. Not just "Hello, how are you? Welcome to your seat on the bus," but something more like "Here's my experience of life in racist America. What's yours?"
Racism is so ingrained in the American experience that no one who has grown up here is free of it -- white, black, or anyone else. Until we acknowledge that, describe it, and share it across the racial divide we are not free. The legacy of slavery is still costing some blacks their lives, others their livelihoods, and most their full measure of dignity. As for us whites, that legacy, usually unacknowledged, costs us our full measure of honesty and leaves us woefully unprepared for the end of white privilege that lies in our future no matter what.