Lisa Ray Instagram – When crooked houses and silent wells of hopelessness blur my vision, it’s words, the elation of communication that save me. There’s nothing sunlit and dewy about it. It’s simply that books, ideas, writing saves me from myself. #Betweentheworldandme written as a letter from a father to a son in an attempt to make sense of blatant racial injustice in America is my first @audible listen of 2021. I can feel myself melting. I’ve never felt strongly tethered to the planet, even less so now. I’ve grown a little too fond of sitting on the couch reading, without vouching for my presence in the world in any significant way. The snow is drifting aimlessly towards the earth, Peppa Pig drones on somewhere in the background and I’d prefer to dim the outside world for some time. ‘But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.’ – Ta-Nehisi Coates