Sublime

They lose attention because many of their teachers have lost attention, shed it in the heat of a formation that narrowed intellectual excellence down to one kind of performance, one kind of white body-mind.

out of raw self-interest; the racist policies necessitate racist ideas to justify them—lingers over the life of racism.

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

Elvis’s life before fame featured repeated experiences with humiliation, but he also experienced something else characteristic of the South and the United States in general: the wages of Whiteness. An effort to place Elvis more accurately in history doesn’t just require a recognition that he saw his indebtedness to Black musicians. It also means th

Out of this incredible brutality, we get the myth of the happy darky and Gone With the Wind. And the North Americans appear to believe these legends, which they have created and which absolutely nothing in reality corroborates, until today. And when these legends are attacked, as is happening now—all over a globe which has never been and never will

Jefferson in his racist generosity allowed that some infusion of European ancestry afforded Africans somewhat greater capacity, but it is quite clear he would have found me, credibly 81 percent African, lacking. I hold instead to what W. E. B. Du Bois said: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balz

creator of the Smithsonian Museum’s “Programs in Black Culture,” and one of the leading authorities on Black American music culture,