Sobbing near the dry goods, I ask myself, “Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?”
The Equal Justice Initiative has documented four thousand and seventy-five lynchings in twelve states between 1877 and 1950. This death toll includes eight hundred more murders than scholars had previously counted.
African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have loaded their ships without help from Africans like my great-grandfather.
I was eight the year the Dodgers signed Koufax, a Jewish flamethrower from Bensonhurst, and my father, a strictly secular Jew, became a strictly observant one in the baseball department.