It is a mode of attention foregrounding how the often unobserved particulars and emotional registers of human life vitally shape civic existence more specifically, a mode of attention provoking us to see how “a larger, juster, and fuller future,” in Du Bois’s words, is a matter of the ordinary intimacies and estrangements in which we exist, human connections in all their expressions and suppressions. What draws these historically distant and intellectually different thinkers together, their differences making their convergences all the more resonant and provocative, is a shared mode of attention they bring to the social crises of their eras. For white people in this country, “America” is an identity worth protecting at any cost.This essay reads James Baldwin in conversation with two unexpected interlocutors from the American nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Ralph Waldo Emerson and W. That history would fortify our national identity, and any attempt to confront the lie itself would be sabotaged by the fear that we may not be who we say we are. Slavery would be banished from view or seen as a mistake instead of a defining institution of systemic cruelty in pursuit of profit. American history would be contorted in the service of it: where efforts to resist the likes of slavery or to break the back of Jim Crow segregation would be conscripted into the grand story of America’s greatness and its ongoing perfection. That lie is the basis of our present trouble.
For if he wasn’t, then no crime had been committed.
They knew he wasn’t…anything else but a man but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man.
They could recognize a man when they saw one. “The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw.
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