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 natio

white supremacy,

Three white men approached Lamar Smith, who during World War II had enlisted in the Army at the age of forty-nine, and who now, having returned from the war to build up a profitable farm, had enlisted in another battle: “He was determined,” an admirer would say, “that his people would have a say in local government.” The three men warned Smith to s

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.

At the close of Russell’s 1938 speech against lynching legislation, Borah of Idaho walked over to him and congratulated him—and then took the floor himself to echo Russell’s argument that the bill was a violation of states’ rights. (Whereupon Russell rose in his turn to say, “The people of the South will ever revere the name of William E. Borah.”)

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