The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) recently reported that kids as young as ten in England have taken to whitening their faces in an attempt to fit in after repeatedly being the target of hate crimes and being told to “go back to your own country” in Brexit Britain. It seems the more things change is the more they stay the same.
At twelve, my best friend was a white boy named David, who lived across the road from us. …
Dreaming of moving to Africa? Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst. Expect nothing. And you should do just fine.
I’ve always wanted to move to Ghana. I fell in love with the people and the place on my first visit there in 1989. My father had always told me that we were from the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast, he said, was where our people came from before “the…
Many people watched almost the entire first season of ‘Suits’ and had no idea the actress playing Rachel Zane was mixed-race. The first hint that Meghan Markle might be ‘Blackish’ came when Wendell Pierce arrived to play her on-screen father. The next we knew, the American actress was dating Prince…
My Royalist-Jamaican mother would have been smiling down at me, from her seat on the right-hand side of God, as the taxi arrived to pick me up to meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
The idiot Eastern European driver parks his car at a bus stop two hundred metres from my flat, so I am forced to stride up to him suited and booted with dreadlocks flowing in the cold evening wind. He looks almost straight through me just as I reach the stationary…
We heard an almighty scream at Mole National Park, followed by a loud crash in the motel room next door. We ran into the adjoining room, my driver and I, to find a white American male red-faced on the floor with blood pouring from a gash in his forehead.
“What’s…
The young American couple and their blonde children next door are leaving Ghana. “Too poor,” they say. They’ve had enough.
The young American couple and their blonde children next door are leaving Ghana. “Too poor,” they say. “One minute, water no lights. Next minute, lights no water.” They’ve had enough.
After five years of working to improve education in the country where their children were born, they’re packing their bags…
You were in charge as long as you were on your own. Once someone white came along, you became his or her assistant.
In the first two buildings that Ralph Swimer Limited occupied, no white person would work. Not even those without qualifications. The Swimer family lived above the shop at 22 Whitechurch Lane and their living quarters were as disgusting as the business premises below.
Ralph Swimer had advertised in the Hackney…
My silence that day haunts me still.
Random acts of kindness have been the hallmark of my life for as long as I can recall.
When I was six years old, Miss Ivy plucked me from the streets of Kingston, fed me, clothed me, and sent me to school for nearly two years — all because I…
I had felt a guilty sense of relief when Mom finally went, and it pains me now to think that she had been any burden to me, even in the end.
I was never one to think of my childhood. I wanted to free myself from the past. I wanted to get rid of the hurt — to be born again. …
I was out for lunch with a friend of mine the other day when I spotted a cardigan in a small retro clothing store’s window. It looked just like original art and might have been the costume from a blaxploitation film. It had a rounded oversized 1970s collar with dark…
