Sublime

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.

creator of the Smithsonian Museum’s “Programs in Black Culture,” and one of the leading authorities on Black American music culture,

Paradoxically, many of these disciplinary policies are akin to the progressive vision espoused by eugenicists like Karl Pearson, justifying harsh discipline as a means to “close academic disparities.” Schooling becomes standardized testing without creative expression, arbitrary rules without room to breathe, Black Excellence without Black Joy.

By 1932, the historian Henry E. Sigerist had noted that medicine’s systemizing impulses were “no longer concerned with man but with disease,” as Anderson and Mackay point out.

The Princeton and Slavery Project, replete with documents, plays, and paintings, was an answer of sorts. It told the university’s sordid history, in part. There are now historical markers on campus and special tours. But the full consequences of the slave past haven’t yet been unearthed. They reached far beyond 1865. In the ’50s, James Baldwin felt

Contrary to earlier assumptions, hunters and gatherers—even today in the marginal refugia they inhabit—are nothing like the famished, one-day-away-from-starvation desperados of folklore. Hunters and gathers have, in fact, never looked so good—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure. Agriculturalists, on the contrary, have never look