AA- "Prick a Jew , doth he not bleed?  powerfully redressed the balance in the Merchant of Venice. And Jack Benny  was on Sunday nights. Followed by the usually funnier Fred Allen.

back in the trenches of here and now, where taking on new tribal identities still sometimes takes a bit of time, struck me as interesting guerilla activity:

Genealogist trolls Tomi Lahren over comments on immigrants

By Avery Anapol @ TheHill.com, May 14

[....] Jennifer Mendelsohn, the creator of the #resistancegeneaolgy campaign, which highlights the backgrounds of people who criticize immigrants, looked up Lahren’s geneology and claimed her ancestors were also people who came to the United States not speaking English.

“Tomi's 3x great-grandmother had been here for 41 years and still spoke German,” Mendelsohn wrote. “Her 2nd great-grandmother had been here for 10 yrs. Spoke no English. Her great-grandfather's 1895 baptism from MN? Recorded in Norwegian.” [....]

Meghan Markle and the Bicultural Blackness of the Royal Wedding

Op-ed by Salamishah Tillet @ NYTimes.com, May 20

“Who are your people?” is the question that repeatedly came to me as I watched Doria Ragland, Meghan Markle’s mother, sitting a few feet away from her daughter at Saturday’s royal wedding. A common expression among southern African-Americans when greeting a stranger, it is never simply a matter of bloodline or individual biography. Rather, responses like “I’m the daughter of so and so” or “My family comes from here by way of there” serves the greater purpose of attesting to one’s place in history and potential bonds of kinship [...]

Edit to add The Times' note on op-ed writer:

Salamishah Tillet (@salamishah) is an associate professor of English and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-founder of A Long Walk Home, a nonprofit group that uses art to empower young people and end violence against girls and women.

Apart from Tillet's interesting opinion: This cynic tuned in to see the dress and move on and got stuck watching the whole damn show and was mightily impressed with each and every part. Who knows why I was so cynical, I should have learned by now, that this church entity after 4 or 5 decades of being "with it", the Anglican/Episcopal church is filled with people who have the pulse of the progressive zeitgeist, and are deep into it, and masters of speaking to it and dealing with it, whatever it might be at the time. And I should also have learned by now that the Brit royal family knows how to do spectacle, turned up or toned down as need might be. Was a thoroughly 21st-century cultural event and dare I say it, I also think: one for the history books, a milestone marking a major point of culture change.

Bouncing around twitter shortly thereafter, I easily found that I was not alone as a cynic who got hooked and impressed. Including many of the "black twitter" tribe.