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I recently had an argument with a close colleague, who I trust and who is white. I am the sole person on my team who has been vocal for change. I have tried to raise awareness around having a structured equity, diversity and inclusion plan in place. I am the only nonwhite person on my team. I work for a prominent classical music organization. In this week's Work Friend, Roxane counsels a woman who wants her workplace to "do better".
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I can't begin to fathom what seems like an adversarial tone in that article. I didn't do anything difficult: I did what the professionals asked me to do.
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When I was asked to hold a blood pressure cuff in place on my skinny arm, I did. When I was asked to re-position myself for a side X-ray, I did. The tone in the writer's column was so alien to my experience: maybe being a working-class Midwesterner accounts for the difference. I was very warm and friendly with many of the people helping to care for me, since I genuinely respected their work, and would hate to be disrespectful. Some of the aides who saw me several times a day seemed to relax their rules a bit, but I always tried to remind people that I'd be happy to put my mask back on, or wash my hands once again. The rules about masks seemed to be enforced unevenly (I think they knew I had been tested and was negative). They were men and women, from all over the world: if I were told to wash my hands thoroughly and use disinfectant, I did.
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In every case, when a nurse or nurse's aide or some other health professional came to my room, I totally deferred to their instructions. I've recently spent several weeks in a couple of different hospitals for various problems: broken bones, vitamin deficiencies, and (eventually) acute depression. I sort of feel like I live in some kind of science-fiction world. This pi ce de r sistance is so immaculately orchestrated that each character, each setting, and each sentence sings.What a bizarre column. But her road gets rockier, and a marriage proposal from a Haitian man brings mixed blessings, leading her to continue reflecting on the limits of freedom for a Black woman. There was no past, no promised future, only the present of one sustained note." After Libertie is kicked out of Cunningham, she schemes to bring Experience and Louisa to Brooklyn and sing for the Black community. When her mother insists on treating the same white women who recoil at Libertie's dark skin, she believes her mother "gave up co-conspirators for customers." Desperate to secure a future for Libertie, her mother sends her off to Cunningham College in Ohio, but Libertie turns away from her studies after she meets fellow students Experience and Louisa: "When I sang with them, my whole history fell away. In her poetic narration, she gives testimony to the injustices of white supremacy she witnesses and reflects on colorism, "colorstruck" misogyny, and the potential shackles of marriage, all the while turning over the question of what freedom is. But Libertie, whose day-to-day experience differs from her mother due to her darker skin, is more interested in music and wants to follow her own path. Libertie Sampson, a freeborn Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, is pushed by her mother, a doctor, to follow in her footsteps. Greenidge (We Love You, Charlie Freeman) delivers another genius work of radical historical fiction. Immersive, lyrical and deeply moving, Libertie is a novel about legacy and longing, the story of a young woman struggling to discover what freedom truly means - for herself, and for generations to come. Shrinking from her mother's ambitions for her future, Libertie ventures beyond her insulated community, hoping that somehow, somewhere, she will create a life that feels like her own.
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The only daughter of a prosperous Black woman physician, she was born free in a country still blighted by slavery.
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Libertie Sampson was named by her father as he lay dying, in honour of the bright, shining future he was sure was coming. 'An elegantly layered, beautifully rendered tour de force that is not to be missed' - Roxane Gay 'A feat of monumental thematic imagination' - The New York Times Book Review One of Roxane Gay's Audacious Book Club Picks LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 PEN AMERICA OPEN BOOK AWARD Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction 2022