Michael earns his degree. Photo: Cathy de Moll
A young man named Michael graduated from college the other day. He was at the back of the line both literally and figuratively - the last of his program to take the university stage. His was a ten-year slog against financial and academic barriers, but Michael beat the odds: he's out of the homeless shelters and dubious living situations that defined his childhood; he raised himself and lives now in his own apartment; he's not in jail, like too many other young Black men in America; he worked long hours in a group home to earn his own way; and he's come out the other end with a BA in criminal justice and a counseling job in a local school. It is a hero's story.
I've been uncharacteristically quiet the past few weeks as the rhetoric building around the death of Freddie Gray evolved (almost) to national dialog. To write about anything other than this - America's deepest open wound - seemed inane. But about the events unfolding, I didn't know what I could add. Michael and his brother Tony have been my context - politics made personal by the people you love. I've known them for seventeen years now and each has lived in my house on and off when they had nowhere else to stay. One day when we were flummoxed over getting him somewhere he needed to be, I offered Michael my Passat. He shook his head. "If I drive your car," he said, "I'm sure to be pulled over. Nobody will believe it's mine."
As I struggled to find my voice, my own grown son offered wise advice: "Sometimes we white people need to just shut up and listen," he cautioned. Not to say that we understand the pain of Black America, because we never can; not to assume one group is right and all others wrong or that, in fact, there exists one truth and one truth only; not to assume that solutions, if they are to be found and we have the courage, will be any simpler than the problems' deep, embedded roots; not to forget that to make it right, some of us must acknowledge and then relinquish our privilege and our power, if a more just nation is really what we want.
And so I've listened to the voices in the streets, in academic institutions, in politics and government - the powerful and the powerless holding each other accountable and challenging our country to finally break through. To me they all look young enough to be my children (in fact, they mostly are), but I give the world over to them gladly. I am grateful for their passion, their anger, their ideas, their heart, compassion and resolve. It will take all kinds - the activists and poets, the peacemakers and agitators, the thinkers and the doers, the ambitious and the laconic Michaels slogging through. I am rooting for their success. I'm rooting for us all.
Somewhere in the midst of all the debate, Michael sent me a FaceBook text, a rare and welcome treat. He wanted me to attend his graduation, to witness the moment he becomes a man and takes his place in the world. "All I want," he told me once, "is my own apartment, a TV and a car. That's it. That's all I need." By those measures, Michael is already a success and a hero. And about his accomplishment, I will not be silent. I am so proud. But I also admit to being nervous for him in ways I do not have to worry about my own sons - aware of how his dreams and accomplishments can so easily be stripped away on the wrong street corner or might simply go unseen through the color of his skin. I cannot understand his experience, but I can hope that within mine and Michael's life span, that worry ceases to be necessary.
Meanwhile, I celebrate the person Michael is and all that he has done. Congratulations, Michael. Love and thank you.