One thing I was taught about travel—because my father is a black man born in Alabama in 1950—was that there are safe places for black people to go and places that aren't as safe.
I left the car by the roadside and ran up the slope, in tears now, reaching the picnic tables and swings and, as bright and vivid as in my dreams, my purple-shaped climbing frame, exactly as I remembered it.
With a deep understanding of colonizing narratives, Emma Bracy at Hazlitt assembles historical and personal snapshots to form a record of the ongoing dehumanizations that have led to this continuing…