Benjamin Baugh,
Athens, GA.

I am a white man and my daughter is a black girl. One day, I will have to walk with her down into the woods behind the old family farmhouse and show her the place where the short row of cabins once stood, and I’ll have to own that ancestral sin absolutely and without the equivocation my Southern upbringing inclines me to make.

She will own the old house, and the land it sits on one day, and it’ll be her decision how to handle that legacy. I hope I have it in me to always speak truth about these things to her.