Been thinking about the UN a lot recently and it brought up memories of this profile of Kofi Annan from the New Yorker.
Probably once a month I think about this passage:
‘”They went somewhere and Kofi needed a haircut. The guy said, ‘We don’t cut niggers’ hair,’ and he said, ‘I’m not a nigger, I’m an African,’ and the guy said, ‘That’s O.K., come on, siddown’—and cut his hair.”
What struck Linnee about this was “the difference between Africans’ and African-Americans’ thinking about race.” She said, “Kofi didn’t think about it. It was never a question of race for him,” and she noticed that it was the same for a Nigerian aristocrat he hung around with. “They didn’t think they were in any way involved. They didn’t even think of colonialism as a matter of race,” she said.’
I know its long to read on the internet but worth it if you make it through.
