Sublime

WHITE PEOPLE HAVE their own dueling consciousness, between the segregationist and the assimilationist: the slave trader and the missionary, the proslavery exploiter and the antislavery civilizer, the eugenicist and the melting pot–ter, the mass incarcerator and the mass developer, the Blue Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter, the not-racist

white supremacy,

he was a white man.”

Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow! For black is the color of evil; only the robes of the saved are white. It is this cry, implacable on the air and in the skull, that he must live with.

he was a white man.”

The white man behind it was Elihu Embree, an iron manufacturer and former slave owner who had evolved, at age thirty, into an abolitionist. Elihu mailed his newspapers to Southern politicians, intent on persuading them to end the horrors of slavery.

A white, even if he rides barefoot on horseback, considers

“I don’t consider niggers in the same light as I would a white man,”

White people have generally advocated for both assimilationist and segregationist