MARY CHURCH TERRELL Fights Back Against Segregation Color coding and the battle against white spaces are part of the story of America. Black parents learned it from their parents, who learned it from theirs. Black people are careful to teach their children about color-coded places being color conscious is a matter of safety for kids who might get mistaken as a threat. White places are parks, streets, stores, neighborhoods, even schools-anywhere white people decide that they should be in control. No American, Black or white, is surprised when stories like these make the news, because we all take these color-coded places for granted, even though America pretends to be color-blind. Black people followed in stores, Black drivers trailed by police in white parts of town.

Two Black men in Philadelphia arrested for simply being in a Starbucks. Do what she says, she ordered, or she’d call the police. On April 29, 2018, a white woman named Jennifer Schulte aimed the same message at a Black family picnicking in a park in Oakland, California. I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.”Īmy had decided to remind Christian where he was. “I’m taking a picture and calling the cops…. Amy pulled out her cell phone and started to dial. Hayakawa, a polymath who earned a shout out on “ Black Man,” Stevie Wonder’s epic tribute to the multicultural roots of the nation.CHRISTIAN COOPER, a Black man, out for an afternoon of bird watching in Central Park, had asked Amy Cooper to put her dog on a leash in a place where it was forbidden for dogs to roam free. But neither would America be as viable without the Pulitzer Prize-winning writing of Jhumpa Lahiri, the poetry and hip-hop artistry of Mona Haydar, the trailblazing ceramic art of Toshiko Takaezu, Feng Zhang’s innovations on the CRISPR technique for altering DNA, or the pioneering work in semantics and politics of scholar-turned-senator S.I. Without Black folk - from Frederick Douglass to John Lewis, from Mahalia Jackson to Jay-Z - America couldn’t possibly be what it is today. Our spirituals and blues, our jazz and hip-hop, our preaching and prophesying, our styles and performances, articulated the American soul.

African Americans may have worked out our identities and cultural traditions on the margins of the nation, but our inventions and imagination long ago claimed center stage in the unfolding American drama. The Black American template exists for a reason.

Unequal by Michael Eric Dyson