Haili Blassingame

It came pretty late in the process.

Okay, great.

I found an interview with Janine from the 70s on YouTube.

She's in her mid-20s, her black feathery hair rippling away from her face.

Many critics didn't know what to make of your first novel, the interviewer says, legs crossed in his armchair.

It was controversial, to say the least.

What was it you were trying to say?

I wanted to write about love and being young, but also rebellion.

Janine aggressively smokes a cigarette in luxuriant bell sleeves.

I guess I was writing against respectability.

Bonnie, at one point she argues with her professor that racial uplift is a sham.

She does.

Why is it a sham?

Maybe sham isn't right, but it's certainly a trap.

You can't moralize your way out of a racist system by, say, getting married, being a good Christian, adopting white nuclear family practices.

But Black people have and continue to believe this, that if they just do this or that, equality will be attained.

Though it's never about what you do or don't do.

You don't attain equality.

It's yours already.

It's the claiming of what's already yours that's the struggle.