I met Abi a few weeks ago at Alice's Circular Summit - we were standing in line near each other and started chatting. She shared about her organization - Raising Smart Girls - and handed me her card. I read the back of it and got tears in my eyes. It reads:

"Kids are born in different homes and situations every day but your daughter, she was born to you. You, mom, are your child's unfair advantage. You are doing a great job. We are just here for support! "

Since becoming a parent, it has become glaringly obvious to me that no child gets to choose their parents (I mean, I would have figured it out at some point, but it really hit me a few weeks after my first son was born). 

I ended my writing last week sharing that I'm trying to sort through my white guilt and defensiveness. 

Then I read this quote in Friday's reading: 

"We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows.  Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine." - E.M. Forster -  A Room With A View

I'm continuing to write out my thoughts as I read through An American Lent - The Repentance Project. 

They didn't slow it down... this week covered the orphan/foster needs in the US; the disparity between how the heroin epidemic is being handled now, compared to how crack cocaine was handled in the 80s/90s and the link to the color of the skin of people trapped in drug abuse. They offered W.E.B. Du Bois perspective on the two souls present within a black man - struggling to reconcile their humanity with the way they are treated. How white American's "dim sense of their ancestry" makes them less aware/sympathetic to how black Americans have had their ancestry ripped from them (that rings true of me - I don't have a great allegiance to my ancestry, so I'm not actively aware that others have had that torn away, and what that does to a person).