I just put ‘White.’”Ī funny story (sort of) when I told it in Oxford, D. I see that in the box for “nationality,” she has written, “Hispanic, Jewish.” So I say gently, no, that’s where you put “ usa.”Īnd the other young woman says “Oh. “We’re almost there,” I say.Īs we finally approach the immigration desk, the budding actress asks me to look over her landing card, because she isn’t sure she filled it out right (I have admitted to being a teacher). As an older woman, a “frequent flyer,” I make reassuring noises to both. She’s from New Haven, but she didn’t go to Yale … This isn’t going to work, I think, but of course I don’t say so. “I’m from a humble background,” she explains to me, a total stranger. She is carrying her wedding dress with eight-foot train in a monster-sized garment bag over her shoulder, and oozing anxiety about her prospective in-laws, who appear to have a great deal of money. One, who asserts gamely that she “works in improv in New York,” is coming “to study Shakespeare at the Globe” the other, nervous and asthmatic, is emigrating, moving to (I think) Hertfordshire to get married and live happily ever after. Dragging three overweight suitcases stuffed with books and notes about Simone de Beauvoir, I land at Heathrow and find myself in a longer immigration queue than usual (because England is playing in the World Cup), and I fall into conversation with two very young American women, recent college graduates.
I am traveling to Berlin to speak at a conference, “Black European Studies in Transnational Perspective,” stopping for a month in Oxford on the way. jonathan arac 2Įaucoup de problèmes nous paraissent plus essentiels que ceux qui nous concernent singulièrement…. annie sugier 1Ĭritics should not construct for our subjects a historically impossible purity.
We should be judged, not by the errors we make but by what we make of our errors.
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