In America One Drop Of Black Ancestry

In The Old Days, You Lived In One Neighborhood, You Knew All Your Neighbors And Your Daughter Married The Guy Next Door. That Was Social And Economic Progress. That Model Is Gone Now. We Also Had A World Order That Was Fraught But Fairly Stable.

I Think Literacy Is Everything.

Censorship Is To Art As Lynching Is To Justice.

What Happened In The Interim Is, Billions Of Records Have Been Digitized. Historians And Scholars Have Always Used Genealogical Records To Tell The Story Of American History. It Takes Months And Years Of Research. I Can't Even Tell You How Laborious That Is. You Have To Be Somebody Who Has A Lot Of Free Time, Like A Professor Who Can Take Tenure Or Someone With A Great Deal Of Leisure.

I First Learned That There Were Black People Living In Some Place Called Other Than The United States In The Western Hemisphere When I Was A Very Little Boy, And My Father Told Me That When He Was A Boy About My Age, He Wanted To Be An Episcopal Priest, Because He So Admired His Priest, A Black Man From Someplace Called Haiti.