Closer Than We Remember

One of the women I work with - about the same age as my boss, which is to say old enough to have been a teenager during Jim Crow - told me that she has two signs she acquired (I'm not sure where) in her house, one in the living room and one in the kitchen, which say "Colored Only". She says people, including her own kids, always ask her why she has those signs; I didn't need to ask (apparently her mind and mine are more in sync than I would've guessed) but she told me: "I won't forget. We can't forget." Given the unfathomable wickedness to which black people in America were subjected in living memory of millions of people alive today, I can't comprehend how fatuous some (white) people (and often by people I mean "fuckwits who are more or less in the media") are when they say things like "slavery ended almost 150 years ago". Yeah, but the Tuskegee experiment only ended 37 years ago.

Random fact to lighten the mood: Laurence Fishburne starred both in the 1997 HBO film Miss Evers' Boys (about the Tuskegee experiments) and the 1995 HBO film The Tuskegee Airmen (about the Tuskegee airmen).