I Will Not Be Taught How to Behave

It was an especially bright afternoon of a long red summer, the same one in which I began writing a new book on an old topic—becoming the parent of a Black child in the midst of a global catastrophe—when the man who would months later become my son’s godfather put me on to the work of Deborah Roberts. The form of this introduction to Roberts’s work was a single image, followed by a fairly standard opener for our exchanges back then: What do you think about this as a book