In the hilariously meta “A Conversation About Bread” – a story about writing a story – the author teases white readers over whether they should be applauded for an act of solidarity, though hardly daring, in engaging with a black world that is beyond their life experience. She portrays the emotional challenge to their mental health that is the downside of privilege.
But instead of depicting working-class life, Thompson-Spires examines the black upper middle class who find themselves often isolated in historically “white spaces” such as Ivy League colleges. The book’s title nods to the celebratory 19th-century sketches “Heads of the Colored People, Done With a Whitewash Brush” by the physician and abolitionist James McCune Smith. Her tales focus on snobbish characters whose parents’ wealth has made them “somehow unfit for black people”. Riley may be sophisticated, but his sensitivity doesn’t extend to Brother Man, an equally nerdy street seller. Throughout, she dramatises the flawed interactions of people whose shared skin colour has ceased to be a bridge towards understanding. This opening story sets the tone for Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s witty, mischievous short story collection, set mostly in California. F irst we meet Riley, a very modern, culturally savvy black man who wears blue contacts, bleaches his hair, and is irked that his enjoyment of anime and comics conventions might mean he’s “mistaken for a self-hating Uncle Tom”.
0 kommentar(er)
