Empathy should not be contingent on our proximity to suffering or the likelihood of it happening to us. Rather, it should stem from a disdain that suffering is happening at all.
As we walked through the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I pushed my grandfather in a wheelchair he had reluctantly agreed to sit in. He is a proud man who also knows that his knees aren't what they once were - that years of high school and college football had long accelerated the deterioration of his aging joints.
Photography, sculpture, and painting were wielded as cultural weapons over the course of generations to substantiate the idea that black people were inherently subordinate beings; they were used to make slavery acceptable and to make black subjugation more palatable.
The death penalty not only takes away the life of the person strapped to the table - it takes away a little bit of the humanity in each of us.
Who has to have a soapbox when all you've ever needed is your voice?
The power of literature does not lie in resonance with the particular but the way that the particular speaks to a broader, more universal truth.
