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“My Mustache, My Self”

This is a superb essay by Wesley Morris where he starts off talking about his quarantine mustache but ends up considering where he fits in on the broadening spectrum of Blackness, from Carlton Banks to Malcolm X.

My friend had identified a mighty American tradition and placed my face within it. Any time 20th-century Black people found themselves entangled in racialized peril, anytime the roots of racism pushed up some new, hideous weed, a thoughtful-looking, solemn-seeming, crisply attired gentleman would be photographed entering a courthouse or seated somewhere (a library, a living room) alongside the wronged and imperiled. He was probably a lawyer, and he was likely to have been mustached.