On Having a Black Name
“I am a white woman, a blond, blue-eyed white woman, and I have a first name
strongly associated with black women. My mother, a southerner by birth, never
stopped telling me she made the name up. The fact that she truly could not
remember ever hearing the name before, is a testament to the strength of
southern segregation. It is likely she heard it once or twice, and simply forgot
it until later. And so, even at 50 years old, I have a name that makes people do
a double-take. “You’re _____?” is something I have heard all my life. “Yes, that
would be me,” is what I say, as they look confused. I have upset the social
order. Names, I have learned, are a big, big part of it.”
Accused penis thieves captured.
Police in the Congo have arrested 13 individuals suspected of stealing, or
shrinking, their victims’ penises. It seems that the accused practitioners of
black magic were nabbed for their own protection. A dozen years ago, mobs killed
a group of men rumored to be penis snatchers. From Reuters:
Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa,
Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants.
They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of
fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.Purported
victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply
touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents
said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure…“But
when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell
you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent, (said Kinshasa’s
police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko.) To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if
you haven’t gone home and tried it’,” he said.
