White Women Must Cross This Bridge

What’s interesting is the fact that two of the four portraits by area artists featured on the cover of the Arts & Culture section of my local paper are of white women with a hand over her mouth. What are the odds? Finally, it seems, we are all standing together on the threshold of being able to name out loud what has been churning in our bellies for centuries! This is the first story I write, after dozens of drafts over the years, that has substance one can sink their figurative teeth into. It’s a story of stories that can get really ugly and hard to hear. It’s a story of the end of self recrimination, the beginning of the end of a cognitive dissonance so foggy that one forgets they had once been in search of clarity.