Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination.
Toni Morrison • Playing in the Dark
The way private enterprise took over the grounds of public housing and Black life in New Orleans is consistent with the norms of late capitalism in the United States. Everything is subject to markets. Folkways have little power without capital. But there is a particularly sharp way gentrification cuts in the South, a region built by the people who
... See moreImani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
A few years later, we would meet a skinny, scared, scarred, brilliant black man who walked like you want me to walk, talked like you want me to talk, and wrote like you want me write. When he became president of the United States, you would tell your 235-pound child that the costs of any president loving black folks might be too much, but the viole
... See moreKiese Laymon • Heavy: An American Memoir
As Real America breaks down the ossified libertarianism of Free America, Just America assaults the complacent meritocracy of Smart America. It does the hard, essential thing that the other three narratives avoid, that white Americans have avoided throughout our history. It forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to
... See moreGeorge Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
Walter White, himself a novelist as well as a leading official with the NAACP, expressed both admiration and regret that he had not thought of the title first.
Randall Kennedy • Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but by blood”—his last words before execution were recorded, and, as has often been noted, they were prophetic. But they were also only partly true. Certain crimes were ceased by the Civil War, but they have not been purged. Not yet. Harpers Ferry is
... See moreImani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
As legal scholar Michelle Alexander outlines in The New Jim Crow, her bestselling account of the War on Drugs and its impact on the criminal justice system, more black men are currently under correctional control in the United States than were enslaved in 1850.
Rachel Monroe • Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession
about her leadership capabilities and political knowledge.43