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Revival, Anya Van Wagtendonk
Revival, Anya Van Wagtendonk
Capstones
My hometown, Great Barrington, MA, has one famous former resident: NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois. For generations, his legacy in the predominantly white town was hardly acknowledged. People actively protested the landmarking of his birth site in the 1960s. When I was a kid, plans to name a new middle school after him were scrapped after the uproar grew too loud. Even in this supposedly liberal enclave in western Massachusetts, people continued to object to his membership in the Communist Party. As former NAACP president Cornell Brooks said recently, this would be like Princeton, N.J., ignoring that Einstein had ever …
Mixed Feelings: Growing Up Biracial In America, Alexandra Boothe
Mixed Feelings: Growing Up Biracial In America, Alexandra Boothe
Capstones
My mom is the daughter of 2nd generation Swedish and Danish immigrants and my dad is the son of Jamaican immigrants, who settled in the segregated city of Baltimore just months before his birth in a black-only hospital. In the eyes of Americans, they were a white woman and a black man embarking on a relationship that was less than palatable to many in this country-- including my mom’s own family.
Growing up, society was constantly forcing me to question my identity, but it was also true within the context of my mom’s side of the family. There was …