Sublime

I remind my readers that I am addressing white people at the societal level. I have friends who are black and whom I love deeply. I do not have to suppress feelings of hatred and contempt as I sit with them; I see their humanity. But on the macro level, I also recognize the deep anti-black feelings that have been inculcated in me since childhood. T

the papers of the Southern Conference Education Fund, is my mother talking in 1974 about the indigenous prison struggle, meaning Black Southerners recognizing that locking people up was a tool of social control.

than be slaves to market forces (Du Bois 1933b).

But the cruelty is not slavery. Don’t call it that. The cruelty is in being caught up in a system like slavery when you are called, by right and law, free.

In Walter’s home, there is a box with a letter that Napoleon Bonaparte wrote to Toussaint L’Ouverture. And in another, letters Romare Bearden wrote to a lover. There’s a first edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs, which is perhaps the most significant slave narrative written by a woman. His version was the pseudonymou

in focusing only on the material basis of harm—environmental hazards, brutal police officers, and discriminatory employment algorithms, to name a few—we may overlook the ideas and ideologies that continue to give rise to those harms again and again. If, as Kelley laments, “There are very few contemporary political spaces where the energies of love

My point

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