Tag: Bennie Greer

For years I laboured under a delightful cognitive shortcut, the kind the brain builds when it decides two people are essentially doing the same job and therefore need only one filing cabinet between them. In my mind there lived a composite figure: formidable, telegenic, fond of a well placed intellectual demolition on live television, and, crucially, British by adoption rather than birth. I called her, in the privacy of my own head, "the Greer." It never once occurred to this internal editor that there were, in fact, two of her: one African American, one Australian, one from Chicago's West Side, one from Melbourne, sharing a surname, a sharp tongue and, apparently, my short term memory.