My connection to color prejudice comes mostly from high school. I was one of the few white students at Hyde Park High, on the South Side of Chicago, in the 1960’s. In my school there were six tracks - dumbest to brightest by the school’s assessment - and the darkest kids were in the lowest tracks.

Big Bad Beautiful Brown came about when I was working with my friend Charlotte Sherman. Charlotte and I met online in 2009 when I contributed to her Kickstarter - she hoped to fund a trip to Mississippi to do research for a book she was writing.