Why God Doesn’t Help Black People
Happy Birthday to Me!
For in the story of Jesus, believers found kinship and a promise. Jesus was a god made mortal, a wrongly captured man who endured torture and violent death. Forced migrants [black African American slaves] already knew what it was like to journey into a grave. But the story told them that Jesus had risen from his tomb and returned to tell the captives of a new kingdom whose gate he had opened.
— Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told — Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, 2014
Today, April 22, is my birthday.
As for my age, let’s just say that I was born while the earth was still cooling down from its long period of “heavy bombardment” by comets, meteors and asteroids. At that time, T-Rex was just a gleam in a juvenile earth’s eye.
Okay, unlike a whole lot of people, certain aunts especially, I do not guard my age as though it is a national defense Top Secret. 1949 was just four years after the end of the Second World War…or as Archie Bunker calls it, “WW2, The Big One.” Hell, Harry Truman was president when I was born!
So, yeah, that’s right. I’m a bonafide, certified, card-carrying “Baby Boomer” — and proud of it.
