In...Detroit in the 1940s, with its free-spending, predominantly white working class, and its bone-chilling winters, bowling provided a year-round getaway from war work, a way to recreate and socialize right in the neighborhood. But it was a segregated oasis, one that barred black Detroiters from almost all the best lanes. And with trainloads of black Southerners coming to town seeking newfound prosperity and social equality, the game of ten-pin began to symbolize equality in a way that’s hard to understand today.

To speak of diversity, in light of this country’s history of racial recidivism, is to focus on bringing ethnic variety to largely white institutions, rather than dismantling the structures that made them so white to begin with. And so, sixty years after Brown, it is clear that the notion of segregation as a discrete phenomenon, an evil that could be flipped, like a switch, from on to off, by judicial edict, was deeply naïve...For the tragedy of this moment is not that black students still go to overwhelmingly black schools, long after segregation was banished by law, but that they do so for so many of the same reasons as in the days before Brown.

...based on the true story of Dido Belle, a mixed-race woman raised as an aristocrat in 18th-century England. It follows Belle, adopted into an aristocratic family, who faces class and color prejudices. As she blossoms into a young woman, she develops a relationship with a vicar's son who is an advocate for slave emancipation.