“For these people, The Cosby Show was just amusement,” McBath said. “They don’t know that in the black community the Cosbys exist. They don’t know that we educate our children, we train up our children, we have fathers, nurturing, and supporting. We have that. But that’s the America that a lot of people don’t know exists, and they don’t know because they don’t want to see it.”

But American blindness had not dissuaded her, and when I asked about the path forward she spoke mostly (like the president she supports) of communal self-improvement. “We’ve become apathetic and comfortable, thinking we have arrived,” she said. “A lot of us know we have an African-American president, but they don’t know how he got there. They don’t know what our forefathers did to get him there. And you can’t fault our children. Shame on us, the parents. Shame on us.”

In this I heard the essential problem of 21st-century black philosophy. Black people are a minority in the country they built. The legacy of that building has remanded them to the basement of America. There are only two conscious ways to escape the basement: (1) Appeal to the magnanimity of white people. (2) Become super-human.

via To Raise, Love, and Lose a Black Child – The Atlantic.

When your son is murdered for being a teenager, all the cold hard rationalizations go out the window. We want to focus on what we could have done to protect them. She didn’t do anything wrong. Her son didn’t do anything wrong. Our kids being historical experts and deferential to our parents that won’t save them from murderous bigots. The shame should lie with the killers.