Textual gems: Tiffanie Drayton

Salon has an article giving a view of America from woman that should be our friend and neighbor:

I survived because I was never able to make America my home. I never watched my childhood neighborhood become whitened by helicopter lights in search of criminals or hipsters in search of apartments. No state, city or town has been a mother to me, cradling generations of my family near her bosom, to then be destroyed by unemployment or poverty. No school system had the time or opportunity to relegate me to “remedial,” “rejected” or “unteachable.” I never accepted the misogynistic, drug-infested, stripper-glamorizing, hip-hop culture that is force-fed to black youths through square tubes. I am not a product of a state of greatness but a byproduct of emptiness.

It would be so easy to make others a part of our American family. If we could just get past the othering of people, we might create a country where the people we are are discarding could make the country great again.