Everyone is African (2015)
“On this same date three decades ago, I was riding on a train through Strasbourg, France, colored fireworks lighting up the night sky. The holiday celebrates the storming of the Bastille, a key event in the fall of the French monarchy and the adoption of the Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen (the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen), one of the world's most influential documents intended to establish basic human rights, similar to those in the US Constitution. Though the purpose of such documents was to extend those rights to all people, many whose ancestry was not classified as “white” were considered to be inherently inferior by commonly held beliefs and often by law and thus were deprived of these rights.
Today I was on a different train—the number 1 in New York City traveling north from downtown to uptown Manhattan. The ride took about a half hour, and the people I saw coming in and out of the train were diverse, with ancestries from many places.
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