Sublime

My parents—even from within their racial consciousness—were susceptible to the racist idea that it was laziness that kept Black people down, so they paid more attention to chastising Black people than to Reagan’s

They lose attention because many of their teachers have lost attention, shed it in the heat of a formation that narrowed intellectual excellence down to one kind of performance, one kind of white body-mind.

These were the moments when I was reminded that no matter how passively I engaged with my Blackness, it was never not a force at work in my life. And, I found, the knowledge of my Blackness could be used as a weapon against me at any moment.

racist White people unleash on Black people

WHITE PEOPLE HAVE their own dueling consciousness, between the segregationist and the assimilationist: the slave trader and the missionary, the proslavery exploiter and the antislavery civilizer, the eugenicist and the melting pot–ter, the mass incarcerator and the mass developer, the Blue Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter, the not-racist natio

Being a Black American requires double consciousness, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, the habit of seeing from inside the logic of race and the lives of the racialized, and from the external superego of what it means to be American, with all its archetypes and interests.