Sublime
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than she was, by three or four years, perhaps; and she had hair of a colour Ama had never seen before – a tawny fairness like a lion’s.
Philip Pullman • His Dark Materials: The Complete Collection: now a major BBC TV series
the history of ethnic racism, of African Americans commonly degrading Africans as “barbaric” or routinely calling West Indians in 1920s Harlem “monkey chasers”—or when I remembered my own taunts of Kwame back in eighth grade—I tried not to run away from the hypocrisy, either. How can I get upset at immigrants from Africa and South America for looki
... See moreIbram X. Kendi • How to Be an Antiracist
As Brazier documents, city housing authorities and real-estate developers collude to interrupt Black childhood by designing spaces and building barriers within and around neighborhoods that make it hard to play freely. “Black children’s physical and creative movements threaten the hierarchical social order that requires passivity and resignation,”
... See moreRuha Benjamin • Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)

I thought of white men arriving for the first time in an African village, strangers there, as I am a stranger here, and tried to imagine the astounded populace touching their hair and marveling at the color of their skin. But there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be see
... See moreJames Baldwin • Notes of a Native Son
Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer’s paradise, a hunter’s Valhalla, an escapist’s Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just ‘home.’ It is all these things but one
... See moreBeryl Markham • West with the Night
Burns was