Everybody remembers the first time they were taught that part of the human race was Other. . . . It’s as though I told you that your left hand is not part of your body.
When I was a child, to call someone “black” was an insult, a curse word, something that made you fight. But to me it contains all of the history of oppression and resistance, of being close to the soil and the sky, of plain speaking.
My grandmother and my two aunts were an exhibition in resilience and resourcefulness and black womanhood. They rarely talked about the unfairness of the world with the words that I use now with my social-justice friends, words like intersectionality and equality, oppression and discrimination. They didn’t discuss those things because they were too busy living it, navigating it, surviving it.
