I often tease @CaseyGerald that he is like Forrest Gump — but smarter, blacker, and gayer.
He can tell us the truth about our country because he has lived in every far-flung cranny of its dream.
Listen to him here on @NPR:https://www.npr.org/2018/09/30/653086803/there-will-be-no-miracles-here-and-the-american-dream …
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As evangelical Christianity transformed America, Casey was growing up in an evangelical church nursing a secret. After Reagan, decrying “welfare queens,” cut public services, Casey grew up in subsidized housing and was kept afloat by his mother’s unclaimed assistance checks.
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As crack ravaged large swaths of urban America, Casey’s father, a college football star, succumbed to the drug and fell out of his life. As a growing awareness of mental health percolated in America, Casey’s mother struggled with bipolar disorder and fell out of his life.
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As America has grappled with changing ideas of masculinity — and that which men refuse to change — Casey struggled to define his own idea of manhood. As Texas was said to be turning purple, this tale reminds of us of all the lives we leave out of the Traditional Texas Narrative.
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As the Ivy League opened its doors wider, Casey journeyed from Oak Cliff, one of America's poorest neighborhoods (where poor black children are likely to end up poorer than their parents, according to this new data), to Yale and its varsity football team.https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/upshot/maps-neighborhoods-shape-child-poverty.html …
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When a financial crisis ravaged the world, with that crisis exploding at Lehman Brothers, guess who was at that firm in that very summer of 2008, doing research on something called “collateralized debt obligations”? That's right. Casey Gerald.pic.twitter.com/1eyqU2j5H1
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When the nation elected its first African-American president, and a wave of young idealists swept into official Washington seeking to make policy and maybe history, Casey was among them.pic.twitter.com/x30dwJEIHq
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As American capitalism faced a reckoning, and as that reckoning arrived at its citadel, Harvard Business School, which was pressed to answer for its doctrines, Casey found himself there, believing at first and then disillusioned.pic.twitter.com/8qrymbW3qh
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As social entrepreneurship came to be talked of as the new way of “changing the world,” Casey started a social enterprise, believing that sending “MBAs Across America” could save it. He landed on a magazine cover. But he also began to stop believing his own hype.pic.twitter.com/T7iafkZR97
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As TED became the platform for inspirational ideas, Casey stood before its privileged audience and chastised its desire for utopia but lack of willingness to do the work to achieve one. “There will be no miracles here,” he told them.pic.twitter.com/dh2ZJCt3C0
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His words are poetry, his meanings overwhelming.
"I love my parents, but they failed me,” Casey told @NYMag. "I love this country, but it has failed me, and it’s failed so many people.”http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/09/does-casey-gerald-know-how-to-fix-america.html …
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I don’t know any surveyor who has roamed so widely across the landscape of the American soul. I don’t know any coroner who has conducted so thorough an autopsy of the American dream. This is a book for the ages. Congratulations,
@CaseyGerald. Order it: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/549841/there-will-be-no-miracles-here-by-casey-gerald/9780735214200/ …6 replies 9 retweets 39 likesShow this threadThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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