The title of this post, is the last sentence taken from a famous trial closing statement in the movie “A Time to Kill”(1996) directed by Joel Schumacher. The lawyer is defending Carl Lee Hailey, a Black man who avenges the brutal rape of her ten year old daughter, by shooting the men who committed the crime. The movie came back to me repeatedly during the reading “Beginning and ending with Black suffering” (Dumas, 2018), mainly because of this idea of going beyond empathy caused by the misfortunes of a community that, though it’s right here, is foreign to the observers.

How can I pretend to make a change in my teaching practice, without having felt injustice, inequity or pain for just being? The answer may be addressed by Kirkland (2014), when mentioning the attitude of service not that of a savior. If I can relate with the suffering from a human perspective, from what makes us both human (the victim and the spectator), and not with a cluster arrangement civilization, then I can actually serve to closely understand and guide, never to save. In this order of ideas, the most valuable passage to me is the following:
“…those who are so moved merely exchange the suffering Black body with their own. Suffering only becomes legible when they can imagine their own non-Black body suffering” (Dumas, 2018,p.32)