Sublime

These numbers are not a matter of “good people” versus “bad people.” They represent power and control by a racial group that is in the position to disseminate and protect its own self-image, worldview, and interests across the entire society.

Whites hold the social and institutional positions in society to infuse their racial prejudice into the laws, policies, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not.

Philosophically, modernity is often referred to as “The Age of Man.” In ascension since the Renaissance, it crystallized toward the end of the 18th century into a configuration of knowledge that French philosopher Michel Foucault characterized as an episteme in which the figure of Man as the foundation of all possible knowledge. Jamaican philosophe

as the poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper would explain in a New York church immediately following the Civil War, justice was not fulfilled if anyone was unequal before the law. “We are all bound together,” she said, “in one great bundle of humanity.” Our fates are tied up with each other’s, she understood, and the sooner people realize that, the be

Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

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’

“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.”

White people in North America live in a society that is deeply separate and unequal by race, and white people are the beneficiaries of that separation and inequality. As a result, we are insulated from racial stress, at the same time that we come to feel entitled to and deserving of our advantage.