This guy was one of the people in the audience at a panel discussion I participated in at the San Leandro Public Library. The topic was voting rights, and my fellow panelists were Ronald Moore, Board Member of the Alameda County Paul Robeson Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California; Penny Peck, Secretary of the League of Women Voters, Eden Area; and Donald Tamaki, an attorney at Minami Tamaki LLP in San Francisco and former executive director of the Asian Law Caucus representing Asian Americans in civil rights and poverty law. This panel took place on September 8, nearly two months to the day before the recent presidential election. I don’t usually get a chance to speak at community events like this one, and I was impressed with both the turnout and the truly warm welcome we received. While the man in this drawing was not among the people who asked questions, I did notice him nodding and taking notes during each of the panelist’s introductory statements. That felt good, too. I’m a 19^th-century African American literature specialist, not an expert on voting rights. So, it’s kind of amazing that anything I said might have ended up in somebody’s notebook.

Ajuan Mance

Staples, San Leandro, California.

There’s a certain kind of brother who knows he’s doing something really special when he puts on a white tie. You know kind of man to about whom I’m referring. He tends to be middle-aged, with diamond stud earrings or 23 carat gold hoops, and he’s got a super clean, freshly-trimmed hairline. His style consciousness is arrested in time, and his way of accessorizing and dressing recalls the decade during which he came of age. For this man, it was the early 1990s.

Ajuan Mance