The System Changes but the Prejudice Remains

Over the past month, I’ve read Claude McKay’s Banjo (1929), his posthumously published Romance in Marseille (2020), and his memoir A Long Way from Home (1937). Numerous thematic threads run throughout these texts; however, as I read A Long Way from Home, one specific theme jumped out at me, specifically McKay’s discussion, at various points in his memoir, about the ways that racism and xenophobia do not…