This weekend is Albany’s traditional Tulip Festival (from its Dutch heritage). Part of it is crowning a Tulip Queen. Not something normally engaging my attention.
The other day, the local paper’s front page had a photo of this year’s Tulip Queen finalists, five young women. Four Black; I couldn’t readily tell about the fifth. Well, ho hum.
The paper also has a “Looking Back” feature, with some picture from the past. Yesterday’s had a 1962 photo of that year’s eleven Tulip Queen contestants. It shocked me. Because every one was clearly white.
Has Albany’s population changed that much, ethnically, over those decades? Hardly. But we’ve certainly changed in other ways.
Seeing that picture recalled to me the line, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”*
Yet in MAGA America it actually seems less foreign.
* From L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between.
