In 1973, my dad’s film For Personal Reasons won an award at the Grenoble short-film festival in France. The movie is about a man who decides to murder a police officer out of sheer despair over the oppression he is forced to live with. As a twelve-year-old, I mostly thought it was cool that my dad had made a movie with shooting in it, and that Morgan Freeman’s brother played the lead role. But twenty-eight years later, I wander through Dad’s old neighborhood and realize how much Du Bois’s double consciousness has marked black America. How can you survive as a black person in the United States?
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