Zinzy

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I edit my biography in a community app for Black professionals. Other people use the flags of their heritage, and I decide to do the same. Which one goes first, 🇳🇱 or 🇸🇹? I was born in the Netherlands, and consider myself not Dutch per se but definitely an Amsterdammer. Truth be told, I’ve never been to São Tomé and Principe, and the parent who hails from there left when he was ten. I wonder, brushing my teeth before bedtime, whether it’s appropriation for me to use the flag. And then I think of all the brown and Black faces I know, doing just the same, and entirely dignified and correct in doing what they do. It’s one of the prices of growing up Black in a white environment: I wonder when I’ll stop feeling like I’m the racist.