Withholding that information didn’t seem odd at the time. We didn’t make that discovery until we saw her in that waiting room. No one had told us that she had schizophrenia, a severe form of mental illness. Our mother was a patient at a notorious facility called the Crownsville Hospital Center. We were standing in the waiting area of a mental institution. “Oh boy! Oh Boy!” she said, like a kid unwrapping a present on Christmas morning. That’s when our eyes locked, and she gave me the hug.
I was too nervous to sit, so I got up and started pacing.Ī hospital orderly guided my mom into the room. Someone moaned in agony in an adjacent room, while another person erupted in hysterical laughter. The building could have doubled as the prison for the film, “The Shawshank Redemption.” There we were ushered into a large waiting room with mustard-colored walls and sat on a dingy, plastic-upholstered couch with ripped seams. That day began when my younger brother Patrick and I were driven out to rural Maryland, to a massive red brick building ringed by chain-link fences. I began to learn that lesson during my first meeting with my mom. We’ve forgotten one elemental truth that should shape any attempt to address racism: Facts don’t change people relationships do. How did such a dramatic reversal take place in such a short amount of time? White politicians and educators are banning books by Black authors that challenge racial inequality and passing laws in some states that make it illegal to teach American history that could make White students feel guilt or anguish. Three years later, it seems as if the racial reckoning never happened at all. The moment was hailed as a racial reckoning.Īnd then … nothing. Corporations posted “Black Lives Matter” on their homepages and politicians vowed to enact sweeping police reforms. Countless White Americans demonstrated alongside Black people in cities and small towns across America.
The chilling video of Floyd’s murder unleashed what was described as the largest protest movement in US history. It’s a story that seems worth sharing because of a grim anniversary: Next month will mark three years since a Black man, George Floyd, was murdered by a White police officer on a Minneapolis street. It’s a story about my mother, and the White relatives who shunned me at birth-and still somehow became family. But the story that has taught me the most about bridging those divisions is the one I was too ashamed to tell. I’m a journalist who has written about the racial divisions in America for the past 25 years. I didn’t know what to say-everything seemed to be unfolding in slow motion. She wrapped me in a hug while I gave her an awkward pat on the back. She walked toward me with her arms outstretched.
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