Sublime

online spaces reproduce and perhaps even heighten forms of racial injury,

Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train

The summer that author Toni Morrison died, I went on a binge-read of her majestic novels and essays. For years, she had been a beacon for me: a truth teller, a way finder, a culture changer. A woman who bore witness to her own experience and courageously told her story.

White supremacy is a comprehensive cultural education whose primary function is to prevent people from reading—engaging with, understanding—the lives of people outside its scope.

By escorting Olive Garden into the realm of acceptability, I’d revealed my belief that such a realm existed, and that I was one of its gatekeepers. True iconoclasm would’ve been my unqualified pleasure, but I couldn’t unqualify my pleasure.

But when I look at what is putting me and millions of other people of color at risk, a lack of niceness from white people toward

“It tells what happens to an intelligent Negro who discovers that he has, within American society, no future,” observed the Times review. “And it tells in the most powerful and precise terms what this really means—the systematized destruction of Negro self-esteem as an almost automatic function of white society.”

It might be nursing personal regrets. No more the mysterious shadows of the kitchenette, the uncharted twists, the unguessed halls. No more the sweet delights of the chase, the charms of being unsuccessfully hounded, thrown at.

And then I recognized it: it was a tone reflecting the idolatry of the rich that so often accompanies the democratization of things, the flattening out.