Fascinating Details About The Graphic That I Posted Yesterday
Call it a coincidence…
Shortly after I published the powerful photo of a white male confronting a young back protestor, I received the below response from Scott Christopher Marum:
“I’m ashamed to admit that this happened in my hometown.”
I asked Christopher to tell me the backstory, and here’s his reply;
“All I know is that she was raised to stand tall, and specifically told to always meet the eye of these aggressors, to force them to see her humanity.
“In the video you can actually see her remove her sunglasses to make eye contact with him.
“His name is Ray Snowden, and he’s not alone in feeling like he does.
“I’m Native, and I can assure you that I’ve seen racism, alive and well, in that remote little corner of northwest Montana—Whitefish, Montana—where I lived from 1978 until 2018.
“It makes me proud to see so many up there actually take a stand, especially considering that it’s not the most diverse population.”
Thank you Christopher for giving me permission to share those details with the growing number of followers of this FB page.
Now this photo is more than a photo. It’s a permanent record of a chance being made. Stand your ground, speak up, or back down, and bite your tongue.
Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.
That’s what Soren Kierkegaard, the famous Danish philosopher, wrote in his journal
And what did Kierkegaard mean?
He meant that at every waking moment we make decisions that only we can make.
Society or the church or our friends or our family can’t make them for us. That’s how life is lived forward. And that is recorded here.
(For more about Kierkegaard, read Adam Kirsch’s fine article in “The New Yorker,” May 8th,
2020)
