Let America Be America Again

To be an American is to be infused with the plantation South, with its Black vernacular, its insurgency, and also its brutal masculinity, its worship of Whiteness, its expulsion and its massacres, its self-defeating stinginess and unapologetic pride.

What is the narrative of Just America? It sees American society not as mixed and fluid, ever more so through time, but as a fixed hierarchy, like a caste system. (Caste is the title of one of the most popular books of Just America; two others are The New Jim Crow and Stamped from the Beginning.) In the words of William Faulkner, for Just America, “

When I was told, it takes time, when I was young, I was being told it will take time before a Black person can be treated as a human being here, but it will happen. We will help to make it happen. We promise you. Sixty years of one man’s life is a long time to deliver on a promise, especially considering all the lives preceding and surrounding my o

Du Bois writes, Black Americans remain the perpetual “Other,” always on the outside looking in, ever feeling their “two-ness,” defined not by what they are but by what they can never be.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Haitians, escaping poverty and unrest, sought refuge in the Bahamas as well. It was and remains a deeply stratified place, sitting at a crossroads, with the global elites and their tax havens at the top and poor Haitians living in shanties at the bottom. It is one of the tragic ironies of global history tha