Nina Simone

Watching a film depicting the black singer Nina Simone  one is struck by the need to use the adjective black as if the colour somehow identified her.
We do it all the time we label people as if the label black, white, yellow added something significant to the description, "singer".
Nina Simone's career was one of struggle, interestingly a struggle to invent the label of black and black awareness in her fight to get black people to identify their talent.
In the 50s the discrimination in American society was coming to the boil, witness Martin Luther King with his "I had a dream" speech focusing on the schism in American society due to prejudice and race.
Simone's "Mississippi Goddam" which I remember shocking me with its turbulent lyric of prejudice and oppression sung, snarled by this young black woman who so passionately identified with song. To her and the black movement who's call was nothing more than to be identified as equal seemed, to our prejudiced minds as ridiculous, how could people we identified as living from hand to mouth in the black ghetto be equated with the white society with all its consumerist advantage. The depiction of black people as intrinsically different was part of the media folk law and we were fed with the image of fear, fear of their sheer physicality and proclivity to do things that were well outside the norms of our Presbyterian upbringing.
Simons famous introduction to a song she was about to sing "this song is about black people and you white people listening in the audience are incidental", placed the issue of them and us in perspective and should remind us of the lottery of birth and how having a black skin makes life just a whole lot harder !!!