Teju Cole on Blackface and Valeria Luiselli on the Border Crisis

About this episode

<p><span>When depictions of Virginia politicians in blackface surfaced this month, the </span><i><span>New Yorker</span></i><span> contributor </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/teju-cole"><span>Teju Cole</span></a><span> was unsurprised. “A white man of a certain age in the U.S.,” he reflects, “is found to have done something racist in his past; well, yes.” As a photographer and photo critic, he is acutely aware that a photograph captures the thinnest sliver of time, half a second or much less. So any photograph of a man in blackface—or in any other offensive image—always indicates that “there’s a lot more where that came from.” And </span><span>Valeria Luiselli, a writer born in Mexico, struggles to depict the experiences of children arriving alone at the southern border, in circumstances unimaginably different from her own border crossings as the daughter of a diplomat. </span></p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>