WALKING WITH ANGELA: DAY 1
Louise Annarino
March 9, 2012
We were walking home from Van’s market, just around the corner from our house. We had gone to buy a loaf of bread to make toast for breakfast, my older brother still asleep at home. The sun had not risen far this summer morning, the air still cool. I was only 4 years old, too young to run the errand on my own. Thus, I was skipping alongside my mother Angela, dodging the globs of shade cast by the sun trying to find its way through the dark leaves of the maple trees along our route. The contrast of the darkness and the light, ever moving, often capturing my dodging feet, raised a question which I posed to my mother, “Why are some people white and some people black?”.
Taking my hand in hers, Angela responded “God does not want us to be bored. If we all looked alike life would be very boring. He made some people tall, some short, some thin, some fat, some with red hair, some with blonde hair, blue-eyed and brown-eyed…and some white, some black. Aren’t you glad He did that?”
I nodded yes, “like a box of crayons, right?”
“What do you mean?” she asked. She wanted to be certain I understood.
“I have more fun coloring with a box of 64 crayons than the 8 crayon box,” I answered.
“Yes,” she smiled down at me, “Just like that!”.
And now, I understood the power and beauty of diversity; and the wisdom of a God who shared his many images within each of us.
Sean Hannity has been playing part of an early video of young Harvard law student who would one day become the 1st. African-American president of the United States, Barak Obama. Young student Obama was speaking as a class leader before his peers, of all colors. They had been gathering for months pleading for a more diverse faculty; a faculty lacking any African-American women, any Latino men or women. He spoke after one of 3 African-American male faculty members, took an unpaid leave in support of the students’ efforts. The students were grateful for his support.
Hannity’s clip simply shows young Obama’s comments commending Professor Bell as proof of President Obama’s divisive outlook and support of radicals. Hannity does not understand that diversity does not equal divisiveness; it equals inclusion. It is no more radical than liking more variety in one’s crayons.He has it exactly backwards. He does not know he should be dodging the dark side of the leaves; and, instead, dance in the light shining through the trees.
He should have taken a few walks with Angela.
annarino writes 