For those of us who lived through the civil rights movement of the Sixties, James Baldwin's recollections of those times ring frightfully true.  It was a highly tense and volatile time in America.  Too many people died, too many people were hurt, too many people lost everything.  And regrettably, way too many people emerged unchanged, racists still, even today.

     Although the whites who participated in the movement were thoroughly committed to its goals, they--and they readily admitted to this--would never be able to fully understand what it felt to be a black person in America.  Nor do they today.  People who are born into what I will call white privilege, though they may do their best to expunge it from their psyche and worldview, will never be able to shake it off completely.  Like it or not, its legacy endures.

     When we therefore consider Baldwin's points about the Black experience, we do well to view them not through the prism of our often misshapen perspective, but through the lens of a loving transcendence that defines, undergirds, and frames the rhythms of the cosmos.  That we set our hope in something bigger than ourselves:  that we appreciate people for exactly who they are.