Lost in the haze of praise for “The Greatest” is how this butterfly — “pretty” as any person before or after him — stung like a bee not just in the boxing ring but particularly outside it.Muhammad Ali, whose funeral is Friday in Louisville, Kentucky, was the rarest of black men because his unapologetic anger was forgiven over the course of a beloved life. The arc of his anger and the world’s embrace of it marked an epochal change in society -- something else Ali managed to teach us as we take the measure of his legend following his death on June 3 at age 74.Ali angrily rejected the role expected of a black man in American society – non-threatening and passive. How does such a black man become deeply beloved in a culture that so often criminalizes, consciously and unconsciously, the first signs of aggression in black boys and men? This is not a typical transformation in America. White male anger can be the stuff of presidential campaigns. But black male anger gets suppressed. What di...
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