Sublime

how Blackness is selectively celebrated (and contained) within the white imagination.

The fact is, “exceptional Negroes” have always been a staple of an apartheid-like educational system that separates the “gifted” from the “normal,” and both from the “naughty” or “underachieving.” Sticks and stones will only break my bones, but words can lift or crush me.

They lose attention because many of their teachers have lost attention, shed it in the heat of a formation that narrowed intellectual excellence down to one kind of performance, one kind of white body-mind.

For those of us of African descent, the reconstruction never ended.

Paradoxically, many of these disciplinary policies are akin to the progressive vision espoused by eugenicists like Karl Pearson, justifying harsh discipline as a means to “close academic disparities.” Schooling becomes standardized testing without creative expression, arbitrary rules without room to breathe, Black Excellence without Black Joy.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: “The defining feature of being drafted into the Black race [is] the inescapable robbery of time.”

White people were looking at themselves and what their history has wrought, like a domestic animal having its face shoved into its own urine.”

boundaries of an antiblack world might, in other words, remain virtual (that is, immanent or imagined), yet one's paranoia is still a correct measure of

These youth are born into environments of state-sanctioned deprivation, or “organized abandonment,” as political geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls it.