The background to this story is that Daniel Kaluuya, the star of the current box-office smash “Get Out”, recently gave an interview to GQ Magazine in which he made the following observation:

“When I’m around black people I’m made to feel ‘other’ because I’m dark-skinned,” Mr. Kaluuya said. “I’ve had to wrestle with that, with people going ‘You’re too black.’”

“I come to America and they say, ‘You’re not black enough…I go to Uganda, I can’t speak the language. In India, I’m black. In the black community, I’m dark-skinned.”

I can relate to this, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a great deal recently. Dark-skinned men are often seen as sexual predators, as inherently criminal, which is one of the reasons why I didn’t wear a hoodie — one of my favourite items of clothing — for years. It was on my mind so much that I recently wrote a short story, “Too Light”, which I have posted below. It’s a bit rough, but it felt timely, so I thought I would share it. I hope it is of interest; if so, please share.

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“Too Light”

Bosco was the darkest person he knew, and so it surprised him more than anyone in the room when he began to fade. His skin was particularly black, so much so that some of his classmates even joked about it. And Bosco, mostly because he was a good sport, laughed along. It even became a game, the kind of thing they played on the back of the coach on long school trips. One of them, normally Jeremy, would start with the time-honoured sentence “Bosco is blacker than…” and someone else would yell out a substance or object that could only dream of a shade as pronounced as that of Bosco’s skin. Bosco you’re so black, they’d begin. So black. Blacker than a blackboard. Blacker than a ballot box. Blacker than a witch’s hat. Blacker than a black hole’s black door. The game only ended when Bosco, always appointed as the judge, raised his right arm to the air like Caesar to acknowledge one insult as the winner; or when Mr. Griffin, their ever-horrified teacher, overheard them from the front of the bus.

No-one was quite sure how Bosco had ended up quite so dark; blacker than tarmac, blacker than boot-black. There were various theories. Some said that it was because he must have some Sudanese in him, but even that explanation didn’t satisfy the most curious. All they knew for sure about his origins was that he had arrived from his mother thirteen years ago, skin smooth as a kidney bean, his eyes glittering from his beautiful face. And all that the keenest observers knew when he turned up to school that morning was that, well, he looked different.

“Bosco”, asked Mr. Griffin, “are you okay?”

Bosco didn’t know why he shouldn’t be okay. He felt okay. I mean, as okay as you could feel if you had just walked twenty minutes through the moribund London suburb of Langley on a grey Monday and straight into a double maths class. “Yes, I’m okay”, he said.

Mr. Griffin didn’t want to push the point — he was a nice man — but he kept looking up from his desk throughout the class, as the students’ heads bobbed up and down in silent confusion over their practice papers. At the end of the session, he watched Bosco leave, not sure what to say. Something was drifting out of the boy, but he didn’t know what.

Of course, the first of Bosco’s classmates to notice the difference was Jeremy. The most interesting thing about school bullies, which Jeremy most certainly was, is that they prey upon their victims with something close to tenderness; the bully will often be more sensitive to his victim’s mood than the victim’s closest friends. On the rare occasions that Bosco was away from school, in bed with some minor illness, Jeremy could be found walking the corridors almost distraught, his blond locks falling forlornly over his collar. As Bosco left the class, Jeremy — as soon as Mr. Griffin was out of view — gripped Bosco by one of his shoulders.

“Ow”, said Bosco. Jeremy’s hand had the anxiety of a cat’s claw. He turned to face his nemesis, who was around his own height. No-one quite knew why Jeremy hated Bosco so much — they should have been friends, really. They were in the school relay team together, the 4x100, and they had won the district championship for the last two years. They even cheered each other on in their

individual events — Bosco in the hurdles, Jeremy in the 100 metres. They could often be found sitting together at lunch. The only thing was that, every month or so, Jeremy would attack Bosco. The attack was always unprovoked, and always the same. It would happen in public, in the playground or in the queue for lunch: Bosco would be standing next to Jeremy, or walking past him, and Jeremy’s right fist would at once become a freckled cannonball. Bosco would be upended, his limbs dancing loosely around him as he cascaded to the floor: and Jeremy would turn away and walk on, with one or two bystanders coming to Bosco’s aid after a respectful wait, like birds returning to a branch once the storm has passed.

But today was not the day for that ritual. Jeremy had taken one look at his adversary and had known that he was somehow diminished.

“Bosco”, he said, “something’s not right with you.”

“You’re always saying that”, said Bosco. He wondered what had gotten into Jeremy. He seemed to be tanned — where had the latest break taken him? The Caribbean? He was sure Jeremy had mentioned Belize.

“You’re not” — Jeremy could not believe he was about to say this. “You’re not like you usually are. Not shiny.”

In fairness to Jeremy, this was not as weird as it sounded. Bosco’s skin was famously shiny. Each morning, until he had been old enough to do so himself, his mother had taken a clump of petroleum jelly in each of her warm palms and had worked it into Bosco’s face, kneading his cheeks between her fingers. More recently, Bosco had taken up this habit, so that he arrived at school each day with a fearsomely polished face, one in which Rebecca often told him she could see her own reflection.

“Not as shiny”, smiled Bosco. “You’re saying that I’ve missed a spot.” He unfolded a hand, his palm falling open gently as a paperback in a traveller’s lap. He raised it slowly, mockingly to his chin, and swiped a small spot on his neck. “There”, he said. “All done.”

“For God’s sake, Bosco”, said Jeremy. He took his hand from Bosco’s shoulder. “Come here, and take a look.” He pointed towards the toilets. Bosco hesitated, then followed. The toilets seemed to be empty, which meant if he followed Jeremy in there then Jeremy was unlikely to attack him.

Jeremy pushed the door open with a startling anger, and jabbed his finger towards the mirror. “Look”, he instructed Bosco. Bosco looked. There they both were, unusually tall for their age, in the uniform of St. Patrick’s: green blazer, black trousers, white shirt and green-and-gold tie. The other local schools called them the Leprechauns, a disparaging nickname which they secretly quite liked. Green looks good on us, thought Bosco. He liked their athletics kit even more: a sleeveless white tunic with a gold and emerald sash running diagonally across it from right to left, with emerald shorts and white socks. Before the term had started, Bosco had even found a shop online which sold bright green adidas running spikes, so that his school team could turned up for track-and-field competitions in fully-co-ordinated kit. They looked spectacular. Bosco was still fairly thin, so that when he walked towards the starting-blocks his long arms whipped slackly and hungrily through the air, like fire-hose preparing to meet an inferno. By contrast, Jeremy’s body was already a succession of chunks, his biceps and calves as firm as packs of flour.

“What am I meant to be looking at?” asked Bosco.

“Yourself”, said Jeremy. Instead, Bosco looked at Jeremy, studying him as an engineer might examine pipes for any sign of a gas leak. Where did his anger come from? Jeremy seemed to have everything you needed at that age — he was incredible at sport, very good in class but not good enough to alienate himself, and all the girls seemed to like him — well, most of them, anyway. He seemed an unlikely tyrant. His hair had the consistency of lambswool, and his eyes, an insistent hazel, had a disarming moisture to them. Only his nose gave any indication of his meanness — it was thin and pinched, as if Jeremy was in a permanent state of just having smelled something unpleasant. “Don’t you see it?” asked Jeremy.

“No”, confessed Bosco.

But how could Bosco see what Jeremy saw? How could he see something that Jeremy himself couldn’t explain — the faintest fading of Bosco’s complexion, like that first light breeze at the August picnic that hints at the arrival of autumn. Jeremy had not been this close to death in years. And so, unable to find words for his despair, Jeremy attacked him.

It took some time for Mr. Griffin to get into the toilets, mostly due to the crowd outside and also because Bosco had been slumped against the door. When he got in there, Jeremy had finished howling, the tortured noise which had drawn his classmates to listen fearfully outside the door. One set of his knuckles was chapped.

“Jeremy”, he said. “Please, not again.”

Jeremy said nothing. Mr. Griffin, with as much force as his position within the school and his fifty-two years would allow, gripped him by a wrist and tugged him in the direction of the door. Jeremy didn’t resist. “Wait in my classroom”, said Mr. Griffin.

“Yes, sir”, said Jeremy, with an unusual meekness. Mr. Griffin dropped to his knees alongside Bosco, who was thankfully conscious. There was a wide welt underneath one of his left eye, from which oozed two beads of shocking crimson.

“Mr. Griffin”, grinned Bosco, “since you asked earlier, now I am okay.”

“Bosco”, said Mr. Griffin, “this is no laughing matter.”

“What else am I supposed to do?”, asked Bosco, reasonably enough. Jeremy’s father was a generous donor to the school — the athletics track bore his name — and he was the chair of its board of governors. Any attempts at disciplining Jeremy were therefore futile, which is why Mr. Griffin knew that Bosco was already preparing an excuse for his wounds when he got home. But this, thought Mr. Griffin, this was an escalation in violence. Jeremy had never drawn blood from Bosco before. It was not so easy to overlook an outburst this brutal — he would have to do something. He helped Bosco, who was surprisingly heavy, to his feet, and together they walked out of the toilets.

As they emerged, Rebecca was the closest to the doorway. “Bosco, are you okay?” she asked. “Everyone’s asking me that today”, he said. “I’m beginning to wonder if I really am.”

“I just heard Jeremy yelling”, she said. “I was worried about you.” Her brown eyes darted over him. “Oh my God, your eye!” By instinct, she raised a hand to his cheek; which she stopped just short of contact, as if ready to catch any fragments of his face that might fall.

“It’s alright, you know”, said Bosco. “I’ve had much worse than this playing rugby.” Oh God, thought Rebecca. Rugby. She had frequently found excuses to go and watch Bosco playing for St. Patrick’s, covering as much of herself with coat and scarf as possible, but quite why she still didn’t know — every game, she expected to see Bosco mangled out of shape, but he somehow to slip through the debris around him, his heels glistening towards the tryline. “Where are you going?” she asked, in a tone that she hoped was fairly even. “Just the sanatorium”, said Mr. Griffin. “I’m fine”, said Bosco, trying to reassure her. He was still too dazed and too young to interpret Rebecca’s concern as anything more. “I’m not dying.”

When Mr. Griffin got back to his office, he found that Jeremy, contrary to instruction, was not there. His annoyance, though, gave way to relief as soon as he read the note that his errant student had left on his desk.

Dear Sir, it read, I know I was out of line, and that’s why I’ve decided to go home for a bit — to suspend myself, if you will. Don’t worry — I know that Dad would never have accepted it if you had sent me home, and to be honest it is probably long overdue. Please consider this note an official confirmation of my suspension from St. Patrick’s until further notice. I will of course come in for the end-of-term tests but I will not bother you until now. Please also pass my apologies to Bosco because I don’t have his number. I didn’t mean to go after him like that. And please keep this to yourself Sir but you need to keep an eye on him. Something is very wrong with him.

Mr. Griffin re-read the note in full a couple of times, and then, whenever he had a spare moment that day, he re-read the final two lines over and again. Though he was afraid to admit it, he agreed with Jeremy. He called the sanatorium that afternoon, and asked if there were any extra checks they could do on Bosco, just to make sure, you know, that he wasn’t concussed or anything. The school doctor, bemused by his fretfulness, said that Bosco was sleeping, but that he was otherwise fine. Though Mr. Griffin felt a little better about this, he thought he would drop by the sanatorium at the end of the day, for his own peace of mind as much as anything else. When he got there, the school doctor immediately appeared in the hallway, almost as if she had been waiting for someone to whom she could unburden herself. She nodded for him to go into the kitchen, where they would be out of earshot of anyone else.

“Mr. Griffin”, said Dr. Katwala, “I presume you’re here to see Bosco?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t want to alarm you. It’s just that we need to act completely normally around him right now. I can’t figure out what’s wrong with him. About twenty minutes before you arrived, he began complaining that he couldn’t move. He says it started with his left arm, then his right leg — now he can’t move anything beneath his neck.”

Mr. Griffin thought he was about to retch, and for a few moments he did not trust himself to speak.

“Paralysis?” he asked, finally. Bosco was so young, he thought. And his parents were such good people. This was so unfair, so unfair.

“This isn’t simple paralysis”, said Dr. Katwala. “It’s something else.” Else, she said, far too professional to say worse. “I tried to lift one of Bosco’s hands, and found that I couldn’t. He has become incredibly heavy — incredible, in the sense that it is not possible. I do not think that we could lift him into a wheelchair, even if we tried.”

“Heavy?”, asked Mr. Griffin. “How heavy do you mean?”

“Imagine”, said Dr. Katwala, “trying to pick up an anvil with one hand. That is how one of his fingers felt when I tried to lift it.”

“Have you called his parents?” asked Mr. Griffin. Even if she had, he thought, they might not be able to make it for a couple of hours. Mrs. Agoga was a receptionist at Wexham Park Hospital, and her husband was a cab driver with the most rigid of shifts. There was nothing more for it — he would have to sit with Bosco till they arrived. Before he knew it, he was sending a text message to Margaret, his wife, to tell her he might be home extremely late. He was prepared to sit there through the night if needed.

“Naturally”, said Dr. Katwala. “His mother was beside herself, and will come as soon as she is done. I could not reach his father.”

“How is he doing?” asked Mr. Griffin. “As in, is he in decent spirits?”

“He is not so bad, considering”, said Dr. Katwala. “We should go in and see him.”

They walked down the short corridor and into Bosco’s room, where smoke seemed to be in the air. Only it wasn’t smoke — it hung like smoke, thin ebony trails flailing like ribbons in the wind, but there was no scent and no flame. Dr. Katwala and Mr. Griffin, both trained fire wardens, thought first to reach for the nearby extinguisher until they realised that the smoke, or whatever it was, was coming from Bosco.

“My tongue”, said Bosco, and that was the last time that he spoke.

Mr. Griffin dragged a chair to the side of Bosco’s bed, “It’s going to be alright, son”, he said, sitting down. Out of curiosity, and to his immediate shame, he tried to pick up one of Bosco’s hands. It was cold and heavy as steel. Bosco now could not talk. Every part of him seemed overwhelmed. Mr. Griffin saw Bosco fighting to keep his eyes open, both of them fearing what closing them might mean. After a few minutes, the only thing that moved freely from Bosco were his tears, which ran down over the rubble of his new bruises and soaked the front of his white shirt. Not knowing what else to do, Mr. Griffin put the outside of his hand to Bosco’s cheek, to comfort himself as much as his student.

“Bosco. My dear boy. Oh no, oh no.” It was Bosco’s mother, desperate to see her only child. She must have left work at once, abandoning her job mid-shift, and as Mr. Griffin turned towards her the look on her face broke his heart. What he saw there was nothing less than exhaustion and terror. She was in her late forties, the wrinkles slowly weaving their way across her skin, but as she approached they somehow subsided, giving her again the appearance of youth.

“Mrs. Agoga” — began Dr. Katwala.

“It’s okay”, said Mrs. Agoga. “I know what is wrong.” She reached into her bag, and took out a pot of petroleum jelly; without waiting for her to ask, Mr. Griffin vacated his seat, allowing her to sit by Bosco’s side. Mrs. Agoga opened the pot, and sunk one hand into it, then the other, busily rubbing her palms against Bosco’s face. “Please, God”, she said. “Just one more day. Please, God.”

She rubbed, and rubbed, her efforts made harder by the quickening of Bosco’s tears, the only way her son could now communicate with her. He could not now hug her, or kiss her on the cheek, or whisper kind words; inside his throat, his epiglottis was lead, his teeth were tungsten, his tongue was granite. Only his heart and eyes still felt human, and so it was with both of them that courageously, defiantly, he wept.

“Just one more day”, said Mrs. Agoga, more to herself. “Our Father, who art.” And she stopped, then, and dared to look up at the cruel sky. The not-smoke rose up from Bosco, and everyone in the room what was happening now; it was as if there were some vicious, determined magnet far up in the heavens, drawing out the melanin from Bosco’s skin like iron filings from a bowl of sand. As they watched the not-smoke float out through the open window, Dr. Katwala moved to close it, but Mrs. Agoga beckoned for her to stop.

“No, no”, she ordered. “Let my Bosco go.”

They looked back at Bosco. His skin was silver now; no, wait, now it was light grey, there was no sheen there, it was dull as ash. He was no longer crying. Mrs. Agoga sat back and gently, kindly, put the lid back on the pot. “I just wanted to make him shine one last time”, she said. She took her son’s pale hand, which now seemed frail as lace, and placed it between her own. “Our Father”, she began again, and to his surprise Mr. Griffin found himself sobbing, mumbling the words along with her. “Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…”

As they proceeded, even Dr. Katwala, like most atheists quietly staunch, joined them in prayer. “Deliver us from evil”, she said, louder than anyone, with the depth of feeling that this boy deserved. “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for and ever. Amen.”

When they finished, they dabbed their eyes with any available cloth, and there was silence for a few minutes. Dr. Katwala, as a matter of formality, checked Bosco’s wrist. There was nothing there.

“I am so sorry”, said Mr. Griffin. “I wish that I could — ”

Mrs. Agoga raised a hand, and he stopped. She stood and walked towards the window, and watched her son, now a distant plume, disperse himself gracefully amongst the stars.

“Please, my Lord, keep him safe”, she said. “My beautiful child, born too light for this world.”

Swipe culture is tinderizing our lives

By Musa Okwonga

Walking over to yet another automated checkout, a small amount of shopping in hand, I realize: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. It Will Be Swiped. There are some people who prefer to have their goods scanned by a clerk, but I’m somehow always in a hurry, and so, with a handful of swipes and the quick swish of my card, I’m gone.

A little later, on London’s buses, I’m swiping again, Oyster cards replacing cumbersome cash. I might be briefly nostalgic for the jangling of loose change in my pocket, but, ultimately, I’m grateful for the greater ease with which I can make my way. In the future, many of London’s tube stations will be automated too: Giant checkouts that shoot us from place to place.

This checkout culture, a world where we no longer have to queue for things, seems conclusively the way of the future.

Every now and then, though, I wonder if we’re too preoccupied with efficiency for its own sake. One of the best things in life, after all, is the spontaneity of human contact. But, as one flatscreen after another processes us along on our various routes, some of that is being lost. We’re getting from A to B quicker than ever; but the spaces between A and B are swiftly resembling ghost towns.

This immediacy has spread everywhere. We can see it as we shuffle restlessly through the music on our smartphones, or the options on our Netflix subscription; and, increasingly, we can see it in our love lives. In the world of dating, human beings have never been easier to embrace or dismiss. Witness the ease with which potential love (or, let’s be realistic, lust) interests can be swatted aside on Tinder, or any of the other sites who have emulated its format; with a flick to one side you can let them into your life, and with the other you can send them into oblivion. It’s caffeinated romance: speed dating has become amphetamine dating.

Swipe culture was meant to provide us with the fastest and surest route to what we wanted, but instead it presents us so swiftly with such a bewildering number of options that we’re no longer truly sure what we want anymore. What was supposed to be a short, simple journey from A to B now sometimes feels like a trip from A to Infinity. And, therefore, while it’s brought us an unparalleled choice of destinations, it has also given us a growing and often daunting challenge — working out, every now and then, just where we should actually stop.

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How Swipe Culture is Tinderizing our Lives was originally published in Matter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What the price of an iconic food says about London’s insane cost of living

By Musa Okwonga

There are moments when you realize your city has changed beyond recognition, possibly forever. A few weeks ago, walking through London’s Borough Market, I saw a restaurant that was charging £15.50 for a plate of fish and chips. Fish and chips — the cheap staple food of any seaside resort, and here it was, as expensive as a fillet steak. I shouldn’t have been as taken aback as I was: after all, London is now a place where you can find champagne bars in Stratford, a part of town where, when walking home at night, you once made sure to walk under every single streetlight. But I’d always thought that, in a world of ever-soaring prices — just wait for the day that they start charging a pound for a Mars bar, it may be on us soon enough — the humble plate of fish and chips would be the last thing to go gourmet.

Perhaps I’m just being churlish. It just seems that, wherever you look in this city, there’s a new example of eye-watering expense. Nowhere is this more insistent than property, with London rents rising at five times the rate of the rest of the country. As a result, the funereal suburb where I spent my teens has now become a bustling commuter town, as workers with stretched salaries are forced to live further and further from central London; presumably in search of cheaper fish and chips.

Of course, there is nothing new about gentrification. What seems different about this, though, is its sheer speed. Just a few years ago, Kilburn and Peckham were areas where you were best advised to tread carefully; now they are some of the most sought-after places to live — if you’re sufficiently affluent.

It’s difficult not to look upon this era with some sadness. Once, people of vastly varying means could live reasonably close to London’s center: It was this blend that gave the city much of its cultural richness. Now we’re in an era where, to paraphrase the Wu-Tang Clan, cash rules everything around here… and London, for all its material wealth, is much the poorer for that fact.

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The Fish and Chips Index was originally published in Matter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.