I have mixed feelings about Oprah, but most of them are positive, and anytime she tells me a book is worth reading, I’m prone to believe her.
Especially if that book addresses a vitally important issue. So when I saw her Instagram post recommending Writing My Wrongs by Shaka Senghor, I immediately put in a hold request from the library, and for the last two weeks I’ve been absorbing his words.
Today, I am grateful for them:
“And that’s the thing about hope. In the moment when you feel it, it can seem foolish or sentimental or disconnected from reality. But hope knows that people change on a timeline that we can’t predict. We can never know the power that a word of kindness or an act of forgiveness will have on the person who needs it most.
“What I now know is that my life could have had many outcomes; that it didn’t need to happen the way it did. I was once an angry, lost teenager holding a community hostage to fear and greed. Thousands of youth are making the same mistakes every day. But we weren’t born that way. None of our children are born that way. And when they get that way, they aren’t lost for good.
“That’s why I’m asking you to envision a world where men and women aren’t held hostage to their pasts, where misdeeds and mistakes don’t define you for the rest of your life. In an era of record incarcerations and a culture of violence, we can learn to love those who no longer love themselves. Together, we can begin to make things right.”
I don’t want to mislead you by implying the whole book is as shiny-eyed as the above excerpt. Absolutely, it carries a powerful message: that hope is always worthwhile, and change is always possible.
But it is also full of painful truths—like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, or Alice Goffman’s On the Run, or Ta-Nahesi Coates’s Between the World and Me, it was not a breezy read. And that is exactly why I am so grateful, because as Senghor so clearly understands, honest words breed awareness, and awareness is where solutions start.
Love > fear,
