Bob Marley and the Whalers

… we play an album of Whalers music during dinner which leads to a conversation about the connections we have not been able to make with black people… we have tried hard not to be racist, largely are not, accept that we have benefited from a racist system, but wish we could connect better with the black people we know…

As American As Apple Pie – Amy Sherald © Amy Sherald, Hauser & Wirth Photo: Joseph Hyde

… an article on Amy Sherald, Michelle Obama portrait artist, painting the American lives of black people…

Each person’s identity is revealed only through visual cues and objects familiar to contemporary American life, for instance, the Barbie logo, denim, surfboards, a picket fence, and – in one case – a convertible. It’s all to “reinforce their inseparable connection to the nation’s historical and cultural fabric, and to reconstruct conceived notions and reinforce the multiplicities of Black American life”.¹

… the tension of growing up Black and Brown American, having dreams of an American life that any of the rest of us have, but knowing that for a large section of white America, you are not entitled to the realization of those dreams…