Sublime

“The ultimate logic of racism is genocide,”

This is really the form that the dilemma takes. It is not solely a question of keeping the body alive; it is rather how not to be killed. Not to be killed becomes the great end, and morality takes its meaning from that center. Until that center is shifted, nothing real can be accomplished. It is the uncanny and perhaps unwitting recognition of this

Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may.

In 2018, the Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest statues were removed from Memphis city parks. It was in the evening, in front of crowds who had been organizing against monuments to the Confederacy there. Yet do I marvel at the claims of patriotism under the banner of a traitorous flag. Of course Confederates saw themselves as holding on to

“The founders of the U.S.,” Taylor said, “by today’s standards, were ravenous hwite supremacists.

for she “was now in a civilized country, where . . . people are judged of by their clothes.” Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect.

I’m a sucker for Puritan New England and the Civil War. Because those two subjects feature the central tension of American life, the conflict between freedom and community, between individual will and the public good.

Let’s accept that slavery and its attendant value, racism—though debated—was integral to the founding of the nation. It was a sign of greed that couldn’t be released if the national aspirations were maintained.