BEDSIDE TABLE
“ I first read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) in the late 1980s, when I was 19. I waited six months to borrow the one copy from my local library. It turned my life around.
“I recognized things he was speaking about in early 20th-century America in my life in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. I couldn’t believe that structural inequality and racism was manifesting itself in the same way. He wrote about African-Americans conking (or unkinking) their hair to look European. My generation, I’m ashamed to say, had the wet look, or Jheri curl, for exactly the same reasons.