Sublime

“I had much rather starve in England, a free woman than be a slave for the best man that ever breathed upon the American continent.”

from the unrestrained elements within their own group. The result has been a tendency to be their own protectors, to bulwark themselves against careless and deliberate aggression. The Negro has felt, with some justification, that the peace officer of the community provides no defense against the offending or offensive white man; and for an entirely

In this jackfruit republic that served as a franchise of the United States, Americans expected me to be like those millions who spoke no English, pidgin English, or accented English. I resented their expectation. That was why I was always eager to demonstrate, in both spoken and written word, my mastery of their language. My vocabulary was broader,

meaner. That morning, he’d brought me into the station, placed his thick hands on my shoulders. “This is my boy,” he said. “Your old man’s a hard-ass, kid,” said another detective. “Are you a hard-ass, too?” I shrugged. They laughed. “Send him down to Vice,” another detective said. “Pop his cherry.” They wore suits and fedoras and smoked cigarettes

when the teacher asked me what my full name was, I calmly told him "Booker Washington,"

Moreover, Harriet Stowe had made a black man her hero, and she took his race seriously, and no American writer had done that before. The fundamental fault, she fervently held, was with the system. Every white American was guilty, the Northerner no less than the slaveholder, especially the churchgoing kind, her kind.

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’

I can’t help

blacks “were rather weird creatures dedicated to nonviolence in the midst of a nation as violent as America is, has been, and will be.”