In Class with Carr: "What Does It Mean to Belong?"

The world that Norman Lear curated, including the black world, and the way that black cultural meaning makers like Esther Rolle and John Amos pushed back against him, are a lens for examining the difference between social structures and governance formations in Africana.

After those shows, the genealogy that Norman Lear tapped into, in part to continue an ongoing project of mingling his ethnicity with a fictional American identity, with the framing of Black people as the diminished citizenry, goes a long way toward helping us understand the contempt and pity with which others view us, and with which we so maddeningly and too often view ourselves.