The Shadows We Inherit
The Shadows We Inherit I wrote the bones of this essay about ten years ago for a philosophy class. It was my sophomore year of college, and we were asked to compare Plato’s allegory of the cave from The Republic to something happening in the modern world. At the time, I was trying to wrestle through racism, not as a distant idea or just a topic for a paper, but as something that had always carried personal weight for me. I am adopted. Most of my siblings are adopted. My family has never fit neatly inside one little box. We were a mixed-up family in the best sense of the word, and because of that, race was not just a subject in a textbook. It was attached to names, faces, stories, and people I loved. I have always been drawn to the story of civil rights, not just the marches and speeches, but the deeper ache underneath it all. Why does humanity do this? Why do we build systems that tell one group they are less than another? Why do we decide that skin color, culture, backgr...
