Sublime

“In the future, white supremacy will no longer need white people,” the artist Lorraine O’Grady said in 2018, a prognosis that seemed, at least on the surface, to counter what James Baldwin said fifty years ago, which is that “the white man’s sun has set.”

But in the world of satisfying stories—her preferred domain—both of Olivia’s parents are so much less than they should have been.

But even when the fog is pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it.

A reporter named Harvey Longo wrote a story for the Los Angeles Times Magazine about the two paraplegics called “Poetic Injustice” and won a Pulitzer Prize. Science was mentioned in the article as “The genius younger brother” and “The hope of the family.”

There’s work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same.

Disruption also attracts attention: disruptors are people who look for trouble and find it. Disruptive kids get sent to the principal’s office. Disruptive companies often pick fights they can’t win.

Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive—character—is all that matters in the end.

“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.”