RUBY + KAMALA
One small step for a woman of color, one giant leap for mankind.
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I’ve been thinking that for hours, meditating on what’s next and how to make up for all that’s been lost in the past 4 years, and also wishing people would give their horns a break.
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Humans cheering and weeping side by side vs. Drivers honking and honking in cars is the picture of NYC love vs. LA love this time around.
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We’ve come a long way baby, from 2016, and from Ruby Bridges, who is depicted as the shadow of Kamala, from Norman Rockwell’s painting “The Problem We All Live With”. Mr. Rockwell used a model (6 year old Lynda Gunn) but the child in the story is Ruby Bridges, whose walk to school, a step toward segregating a white school in Louisiana was interrupted by white mobs in 1960, and not just once but every day, for many days.
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She kept walking, kept learning, and legend has it she kept praying, not for herself or out of fear, though there’s no way she didn’t feel the wrath of white adults carrying small coffins bearing black dolls on their protests. No, if what I’ve read is accurate, she prayed for god to forgive the angry white people whom she told god didn’t know better.
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Ms. Bridges is 66 now, an activist who says the response to George Floyd’s murder earlier this year gave her hope, and inspiration for her new book. Guess what she called it? YOUR TIME IS NOW.
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She is not wrong. YOUR TIME IS NOW, says Ruby Bridges. And say I. Kamala is the closest a woman of any race or background has been to the presidency. That she is a child of immigrants, black and married to a Jew, is a bonus. Kamala addressed every little girl, every immigrant child, and every marginalized American, offering possibility and optimism today. Magic. There’s a long way to go for this to be more than another example of black exceptionalism but I have to give a nod to Biden for shaping a win on a ticket that actually represents a good cross section of what it means to be an American in 2020. Onward.
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Image by @briagoeller Concept by Gordon Jones, the artist’s client and owner of @goodtrubble
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#election2020 #kamalaharris #rubyjones #normanrockwell #history
