I have to believe that the “whites-only democracy” I grew up with in South Africa will never take hold anywhere again.
Jean Hey was a journalist in South Africa before immigrating to America. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Plain Dealer, The Chicago Tribune, Solstice Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books and The MacGuffin. She holds a dual-genre MFA in fiction and nonfiction from Bennington College where she won the Sven Birkerts award for nonfiction. She is at work on a collection of memoiristic essays about immigration and race.