Bill Russell: There’s the kind of …

Bill Russell: There’s the kind of strange that means peculiar, perverse, uncomfortable and ill at ease. Now that’s the kind of strange I’ve known my whole life. It’s the kind of strange Billie Holiday sang about when she sang, “Southern trees bear a strange fruit. Blood on the leaves and blood on the root,” referring, of course, to the then common practice of the lynching of Black people. It’s the kind of strange that has dogged America from the beginning. The kind of strange that justified indigenous genocide in the name of “civility.” It’s the kind of strange that built a country out of the labor of that “peculiar” institution known as slavery. It’s the kind of strange that justified Jim Crow, mass incarceration, police brutality, and the inequities that persist in every facet of the Black American experience.