Sublime

When does racial “unconsciousness” or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What

Adding insult to injury, we’re professionally trained and rewarded to make White people the default referent group that Blacks are measured against. In doing so, we acquire a tendency to center White people in our work.

Ray Bradbury had already brought America’s racial anxiety to bear on space in one of his stories in The Martian Chronicles, “ ‘Way Up in the Middle of the Air,” where all the black people of earth leave in rocket ships for another planet.

Double consciousness identifies the psychological splitting in perspective that Black Americans often engage in as a response to the misrecognition and alienation of racism. Du Bois remarked that Black Americans have a bifurcated sense of identity in which they simultaneously experience themselves not only as thinking subjects but also as stigmatis

Bernice Johnson Reagon,

Justice John Marshall Harlan articulated a forward-leaning view, but his was the sole dissenting vote in Plessy. “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country,” Harlan wrote. “And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power….But in the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is

Even now, at seventeen—high school graduate, mistress of her fate, and a ten-dollar-a-week file clerk in the very Forty-seventh Street lawyer’s office where Helen was a fifteen-dollar-a-week typist—as she sat on Helen’s bed and watched Helen primp for a party, the memory hurt. There was no consolation in the thought that not now and not then would