“It was possible, I knew, to live on two planes at once – to have one’s feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress. It was what I had done as a kid on Euclid Avenue, what my family – and marginalized people more generally – had always done. You get somewhere by building that better reality, if at first only in your own mind. Or as Barack had put it that night, you may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.”
