Colored Television

by Danzy Senna

One of the strange parts of being a teacher was how it made time seem to stand still. If you didn’t look in the mirror, you could almost trick yourself into thinking that time wasn’t passing because your students kept staying the same young age year after year. You could fail to notice that you, nevertheless, were getting older.

Like any Black Gen Xer, she hadn’t had time to worry about microaggressions, what with all the good old-fashioned macroaggressions she’d experienced: white kids throwing rocks at her head, white kids calling her father “nigger” with impunity, white kids leaving bananas on her family’s porch when they moved into the neighborhood.