letyourheartbelight

—an excerpt from @Toure’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?

” In 1964, in West Virginia a fourteen-year-old Henry Louis Gates Jr. broke his hip and went to a doctor who x‑rayed his knee, which was also in pain. The doctor saw nothing wrong with his knee and deemed his pain psychosomatic. “He said that I had a nervous breakdown because I was an overachiever,” Gates said. “He said colored people weren’t supposed to do as well as I had done. I had been stressed out and there was nothing wrong with my knee. White guy thought I was imagining things. And that’s why I walk with a cane and I’ve had a dozen operations since I was fourteen.” Gates remains bitter about the whole thing. “I hope that [expletive]’s burning in hell.” “