Sublime

What happens to a society that loses its capacity for awe and wonder at things to come?

obdurate.

In 1964, eight years before I was born, my family moved from Titusville to Ensley. Ours was the third Black family on the block. And the last White man on our block, which changed from White to Black across a few years, diligently kept up a sign that read “Zoned for whites.” Each morning on the way to school, the neighborhood boys kicked it down. E

W. E. B. Du Bois taught us this, and we teach it to our students. Whiteness was offered as a promise. Precarity makes it less sturdy. There are White people who work hard all of their lives and Whiteness gives them little materially. On the other hand, there are White people who come from powerful edifices, who can point to paintings on Vanderbilt’

rhapsodizing