With Racial and Sexual Reckoning, a Moral Awakening in America?

It’s happening — at last: Moral awakening in America. But can it be sustained?

Amidst the extreme disruption of these last several years — the ancient Greeks would properly call it Chaos — and amidst the dread of the deadly coronavirus pandemic, it may be hard to parse. But there is meaning coursing through the powerful currents buffeting America at present, and it is meaning that is moral — that is, having to do with the rightness and wrongness of things.

Two constituent blocs — Black Americans and women — are standing up and declaring that the historical and established ways of treating them are wrong, wrong, wrong, and — pardon the cliché but it is universal lingua franca — like the enraged anchorman Howard Beale in the film “Network,” they are saying: “We’re mad as hell and we’re not taking it anymore.”

Getting from wrongness to rightness — getting from disrespect to respect, getting from dismissal and contempt and withstanding deadly force to mattering, mattering as a human being with a Soul — has been, for both Black Americans and women, a moral quest, a righteous one, one lasting centuries.

And now it appears, if yet still dimly, that the struggle may yield that which has been so dearly sought: justice and equality. The questers are within reach of their Holy Grail. And it took the hammer of a mass movement — two of them, in happy fact, cresting together — to bring this New Day.