“I have no answer. And I want to be able to answer.”

“I still love my country. It’s the only country we have. This is the best that I’ve got,” she said. “And I still believe that there are people here who believe in justness and fairness. And I still believe there are people here who don’t make judgments about people based on the color of skin. I am a product of that. But I am disheartened that as far as we’ve come it doesn’t matter that we have a black president. It doesn’t matter how educated we’ve become. It doesn’t matter because there still is an issue of race in this country. No, we have not really arrived. If something like this can happen, we have not arrived. And I ask myself, ‘At what point are we going to get there?’ And I have no answer. And I want to be able to answer.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates sat down with Lucia McBath, Jordan Davis’s mother, and talked about her son — “In my mind I keep saying, ‘Had he not spoke back, spoke up, would he still be here?’ I don’t know. But I do know that Jordan was Jordan to the end” — and it is enough to break your heart a few times over. [The Atlantic]