I had stopped reading articles about the Charleston shooting and the flag, but my friend Janisse recommended this article highly, as do I. It was written by Holly Haworth for “On Being” with Krista Tippett.

It is a sensitive, poignant piece that catches up the issues’ significant points and brings a true and deep perspective to which I think most of us in the caring community can relate. The mood of the South today, she says, is characterized by “…a sour loss turned inward, a self-hatred that festers, proud.”

And as Janisse said, it gives me words to express my sorrow that I had not found on my own:

I say that I am grieving to tell you that I am crying, and the tears and the sun are a combination of heat and sting that don’t serve to make me, the white Southerner, feel anything close to the hot sting felt by black slaves and their descendants, but that I am trying to know that grief that is leaking out all around me, and that my tears tell me that somehow I am a part of it, that it is in me too.

http://www.onbeing.org/blog/the-thread-of-all-sorrows/7727#comment-1635546