That Old Feeling, or Thinking Dandridge in the Time of Trump

In the dark drama and shock tactics of the Trump White House, I found myself obsessed with Dorothy Dandridge, a woman I had been quite unaware of until now. In following her traces, I recall the South in the sixties, race discrimination and raw hate, as well as recognize her particular kind of beauty, so strong that it had to be forgotten. Her doomed life led me to reflect on how old inequalities are always repackaged in new ways. What does it mean, in the words of Harry Belafonte, to write about a “black woman” who had to pay a “price for her blackness”? Perhaps the only way right now is to return to the catastrophic racism of the South, its history and continued life in the current spectacles of hate and celebratory violence, which are part of that “old feeling” of legal stigma that always bore deep into the life of this country.