Photo of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin: three of the most prominent African American writers of the Civil Rights era. Image credit: New York Public Library Digital Collections.

This is such a powerful articulation--borrowed from Baldwin as the epigraph makes clear--of the social construct of whiteness.

A riff on the title of TNC's forthcoming book, itself a a riff on WEB Du Bois's famous description of black experience in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). As he opens that book in a chapter entitled "Of Our Spiritual Strivings":

BETWEEN me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it.

Hard not to relate this piece to another great statement of African American experience: Frederick Douglass's 1841 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

A line from Elvie Thomas's "Motherless Child Blues":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmj23UrVF80

The trope of the motherless child is a popular one in African American art. Of course the destruction of families was a major consequence of the slave trade and the institution of slavery.