Sublime

narrated both a deeply individual response and an ethical philosophy orientated to a larger social world.

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

Even in the midst of civil strife and hard conversations, I try to return to the great humanistic declaration made by the Roman dramatist Terence: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.”

Here we see how a white masculine imagination flattens social reality. Equal Opportunity Offense is the prime directive, and durable hierarchies are figments of others’ imagination.

Philosophically, modernity is often referred to as “The Age of Man.” In ascension since the Renaissance, it crystallized toward the end of the 18th century into a configuration of knowledge that French philosopher Michel Foucault characterized as an episteme in which the figure of Man as the foundation of all possible knowledge. Jamaican philosophe

To be a human being is to have interpersonal loyalties and commitments. It is unreasonable to demand that these be shunted aside in the name of impartialistic moral reasoning.

thinking about alterity and difference that has become a useful critical tool for feminist, antiracist, and other political work.

Naming who has access and who doesn’t guides our efforts in challenging injustice.