I have been sitting quietly, meditating on what exactly to say after I watched the movie US. It was so much to say + yet I wondered where to start.  So I chose the obvious. Race. As I look at the faces of black folks, I mourn us for so many reasons. We are years away from our souls + haven’t quite fully recovered nor do I think we ever will. Not in this lifetime anyway. It will take several decades to recover the souls that were snatched from our own land + even more decades to remember who we used to be. The reality is race is something we never knew until it was pointed out to us. It was the damaging effects of how racial preferences have a long institutionalized history that often kept black people from opportunities at the expense of our counterparts. It was African slaves replacing the European indentured servants as a source of free labor. It was the General Sherman’s never making good on his “40 acres and a mule” as reparations. It was Jim Crow laws being instituted in the late 19th Century + not being overturned until the 1960’s which reserved the best, jobs, schools, neighborhoods + hospitals for our counterparts. It was the 1935 Wagner Act which granted collective power + excluded black people from access to better jobs, union protection, healthcare, job security + pensions. It was the the Federal Housing Administration deal known today as “redlining” that was explicitly typing mortgage eligibility to race. It was + continually is the border of justice that has always been clearly defined.