“Can you speak the language?” people always asked me after they learned my ethnic identity. I shook my head and avoided their gaze. Lacking that potential fluency felt like a badge of shame.

Black women have every reason to practice imagination in a country that counted us as the means, and the substance, of wealth.

She is footsteps creaking against the floorboards as she hobbles to bed, a tongue that clicks as she says “sit-sit-sit!” with a tinge of a Yangzhounese accent, the married pair of spatula and wok clinking together as she fries bok choy.

Photojournalist Ozier Muhammad has captured some of the most important political pinch points of our times, from South Africa’s first free elections in 1994, to Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Mama was dark liquor brown but only drank Bacardi Light.