French Quarter - New Orleans

After a short night’s sleep and an uneventful early Sunday morning drive to Los Angeles International Airport, we were airborne with our travel team at about 9:30 AM PST.

Carolyn and I were seated separately, but this enabled us to have real conversation with our new friends. I’m tempted to give you personal detail – but that would, perhaps, betray a confidence. When we get one-on-one time, we seem to be eager to tell personal stories, most of which are not ready for publication.

We all have our own reasons for coming to the South in the heat of the summer to study the operative dynamics of race in this country and the history of slavery; America’s “original sin,” as Jim Wallis explained in his seminal book.

This is not a popular subject; it’s not a vacation (as our leader points out) and it’s not entertainment. Most of us come with some sort of open wound, a wound that causes us to identify with that sense of rejection; of being closed out, singled out, left out, glossed over - wondering with some degree of uncertainty: why?

For the most part, our world is not all that interested in sorting out the causes or effects of racial animosity or the advantages of privilege or the history of resistance to social justice or the barriers that block off opportunity. So, each member of the travel team has witnessed a similar reaction from our own sphere as we planned to join this adventure – what’s the point?

But we also know this: there is a powerful reward when we enter freely, with open heart and open mind into this conversation. We find each other. We are driven to rethink our attitude to social policy and our ability to embrace the other; right here in the same room.

In preparation, we watched “I Am Not Your Negro” – the powerful documentary on race built around the late James Baldwin’s unpublished meditations over the deaths of his personal friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and finally Martin Luther King. We took in the Netflix series, “When They See Us” written and directed by Ava DuVernay (who gave us the Oscar nominated film, “Selma”). It’s the story of the Central Park Five, mistakenly accused and then convicted of a brutal crime. Eventually DNA and a confession proved that they were wrongly imprisoned… for thirteen years. I read “White Fragility,” written by a white sociologist who unpacks the reasons why it is so very difficult for us white people to talk about race.

We touched down at Louis Armstrong International mid-afternoon and boarded our bus for our hotel.

Tonight, as we wandered the streets of the French Quarter, along the mighty Mississippi. This evening it flows with a monstrous south-bound current here at the end of the Great River that divides East from West. We sampled seafood gumbo and rabbit and sausage jambalaya and greens and okra and sassafras and crab claws. Here in the heart of New Orleans, we bring with us a new sensitivity, a new curiosity, a fresh desire to learn more. To understand better.

Maybe, just maybe, we'll break through those invisible barriers that keep us apart; separate, and all too often, adversarial.

We are eager all to own our part. To correct. To repent. To repair. To lament. To renew.

And perhaps we’ll find that illusive dream: reconciliation.