Aurora Chorus Holiday Performance

 "The obsessions we have are pretty much the same our whole lives. Mine are people, the human condition, life." --Mary Ellen Mark.


In Ta-Nehisi Coates' powerful book, Between the World and Me is a new definition of racism: "the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them." 

He explains, "Americans believe in the reality of "race" as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world." And he goes on, "The belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize  society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible--this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white." 

What are these constructions, "white" and "black" but fictions about color, about how people look, ascribing meaning to melanin? So much suffering comes from these constructions.

Update: I had comments off because I am short of time for commenting just now, but it occurs to me some people might like to be part of a conversation about race and Coates' book, so I've turned comments back on after 66 views.