A few weeks ago, during Black History Month, I reread James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time.” “I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people, still less to be loved by them,” Baldwin wrote. This was in 1962, the year before I graduated from high school, the year before Martin Luther King Jr. would speak from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, three years before the Voting Rights Act.

“White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this — which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never — the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

How much has changed since 1962?

It has been a year since police burst into Breonna Taylor’s apartment looking for drugs that weren’t there and shot her to death, and even as I write, people in Louisville are demonstrating, demanding justice. Plenty of others are still finding the idea that Black Lives Matter somehow threatening.

But after the white supremacist march in Charleston and the Confederate flag carried inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, we have had some encouraging news. The Biden administration’s cabinet nominees are the most diverse in our history — half of the 26 positions are people of color and 46% are women. There are many “firsts” — first women, Blacks, Hispanics, immigrants — to head agencies, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the first LBGT person appointed to a cabinet post.

What I find most exciting of all is the confirmation of Deb Haaland as Secretary of the Interior. Imagine a member of the Laguna Pueblo heading the agency once called upon to help solve the “Indian problem.”

“It’s profound to think about the history of this country’s policies to exterminate Native Americans and the resilience of our ancestors that gave me a place here today,” Haaland said after her nomination. “I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.”

And we’ve had wonderful news closer to home this week, when we learned that Chuck Sams has been appointed to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, the agency responsible for long-term planning for the Columbia Basin’s energy and conservation needs. Sams is the only tribally enrolled member of the council.

And then an even bigger announcement: Gov. Kate Brown has recommended Sams to lead the National Park Service. “I envision students — both young and old, tribal and nontribal alike — visiting Yellowstone, Arches, Mesa Verde or Oregon’s Crater Lake, and hearing the stories of our past and present, including the important stories of the tribal people who have inhabited these special places,” she wrote.

So two people whose ancestors faced the prospect of extermination or forced assimilation so that immigrants, mainly whites, could take their land may be guiding us toward a healthier relationship to that land.

All this made me think of the title our poet laureate, Muskogee (Creek) Joy Harjo, chose for her recent collection of contemporary Native poetry: “When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through.”

Yet, even now, Asian-Americans are being attacked, and Republican state legislators in 43 states are trying to limit Americans’ votes. Arizona state representative John Kavanaugh made headlines last week when he explained that Republicans were happy to create measure that kept people from voting because “everybody shouldn’t be voting. … Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of the votes, as well.”

And of course it’s primarily brown- and black-skinned people who remain, for those who hold these views, a “problem.”

How can we rid America of the belief in white supremacy?

“There is no reason for you to try to become like white men and there is no basis whatsoever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you,” James Baldwin wrote to his nephew in 1962. “The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them … and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope.”

If a 15-year-old in Harlem could face that challenge, maybe we can rise to ours.