Through the pandemic called racial hate—whose potentially fatal impact is evidenced by the recent deer-hunter style slaying of Ahmaud Arbery, allegedly by three white men while he jogged in a neighborhood in Georgia.

And I am haunted by Malcolm X’s words that “America’s greatest crime against the Black man was not slavery or lynching but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt.”

As Black men in America, we wear the mask.

The virus shackles our hands and feet by mass incarceration that masquerades as criminal justice, even as the coronavirus now also seeks to prey upon our Black bodies and souls like old Jim Crow.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile,

Recently, a fellow Black man I encountered outside our local Starbucks in suburban Chicago mused unsolicited while trying to untangle his blue mask: The world is now finally getting a taste of how it means to be a Black man in America, of being looked at as a potential threat, of having to don a mask,” he said.