Sublime

The Princeton and Slavery Project, replete with documents, plays, and paintings, was an answer of sorts. It told the university’s sordid history, in part. There are now historical markers on campus and special tours. But the full consequences of the slave past haven’t yet been unearthed. They reached far beyond 1865. In the ’50s, James Baldwin felt

burned into you that you do not count and that no provisions are made for the literal protection of your person. The threat of violence is ever present, and there is no way to determine precisely when it may come crushing down upon you. In modern power politics this is called a war of nerves. The underprivileged in any society are the victims of a

At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans—lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession—either to come to terms