Natural History

FICTION excerpted from the forthcoming How Whiteness Operates

I think what made it worse was that one of the kids saw it first. Had I seen it, I’m guessing I could have taken the bull by the horns, as it were, and explained that someone had vandalized the diorama. But that wasn’t what happened. What happened was that a little girl, who was about nine years old, raised her hand slowly, with a sort of wincing expres…