It goes without saying that 2020 has been one of the most transformative years, not just internationally, but nationally and individually. It has been almost exactly one year since COVID began to overwhelm the United States and changed all of our lives forever. In my mind, March marked the beginning of a year consumed by, not just pandemic anxieties, but racial tensions and national unrest.

Reflecting on this last year, I have become grateful for the ways 2020 has shaped me and those around me. I realized how much I have to learn and how far our country has to grow. I realized that people matter more than anything else. Most of all, I have a new fire within me for justice, truth, and change.

It was also almost exactly a year ago that I finished The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and wrote down this quote:

"Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren't looking, alluring and ever out of reach. The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others. Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but 'created equal' was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men" (Whitehead 117).

I remember that these words stuck out to me for many reasons, one of which being the evident irony of the Declaration of Independence being recited by a slave. That famous document didn't quite provide the independence and equality it promised to ALL people.

However, another part of this passage tugged at my heart in a deep way I did not expect:

"Truth was a changing display in a shop window."

I imagine I am not the only one overwhelmed with how fast the news changes, and how many different "truths'' there are in the world available for us to accept. I also imagine I am not the only one that knows that the marginalization and injustice towards the black community is anything but new; that, in times of trial, the character of those you know is tested and revealed.

I'm also reminded of the amount of information that, upon going to college, I realized had been left out of my education as a youth. The ugly parts of history were, of course, taught, but glossed over in a way that I never had time to question or even brood on. As a child, I knew about the tension between "whites'' and the freedoms they "denied others" but it wasn't until I grew up that I learned about how long and how present this denial of rights continued and continues to be (117). Is this because in our early education our teachers thought us too young to hear details about the heartbreak of our country (that I have been able to see so clearly this year)? Or is this actually because the "truth" of our country is being displayed more and more as each year goes on? Perhaps the "truths'' in our lives are also "a changing display in a shop window" (117).

What do we know now that we did not 50 years ago? 10? Five? One? Are the phantoms of history angry that we have not told their truth- the truth of how when slavery was abolished, more shackles were bound to the feet of the black community: modern eugenics (this is an aspect that Underground Railroad covers), Jim Crow laws, Police brutality, and much more. Are they angry because, hundreds of years later, the promises of the Declaration of Independence are still going unfulfilled?

We have seen with our eyes the truths that America still attempts to cover up…But what about the truths that we only display in our "shop windows" for a brief period of time, only to switch them out with the next hot topic?

Friends, I encourage you to let your discomfort about the injustices towards the black community not just be "changing displays" in the windows of social media.

This isn't the beginning of the fight against racism, marginalization, and even the privileges of health, and surely isn't the end. I challenge you to ponder: what truths do we believe never even got the chance to enter into the shop windows? What injustices do you want to remain in the shop windows?

When you think of your answer, display it. Not just today, but for the rest of your days.