With a scarcity of Black voices like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Spike Lee, white writers and directors from the earliest media productions took it upon themselves to represent Black people.

Both in my boyhood and now, St. Louis can be a racial pressure cooker, and people shouldn’t be surprised when the lid blows.

I want to believe I grew up in an unprejudiced family, but I know it’s not true. My mother and aunts, when they spoke about Black people at all, tried to be charitable, but they also were patronizing. “They’re good people,” they’d say, or, “The ones we knew in Arkansas were always good to us.”

The path to “salvation” isn’t as straight and narrow as so much of the church seems to believe