Sublime

In my search for an honest way to write about race, I wanted to comfort the afflicted, but more than that, I wanted to afflict the comfortable; I wanted to make them squirm in shame, probably because I too identify with the comfortable.

paradox of identity that Du Bois had made famous among Negro intellectuals more than forty years earlier: “One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings…”

In my head, the critics and the crowd were one and the same.

To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark. As long as he and his black folks did not go beyond certain limits, there was no need to fear that white force. But whether they feared

.” Or you might even flat-out not believe what’s written here. White people expressing shock over racism is racism. It is a version of “not me,” “not all white people.” It is distancing yourself from the harm you all cause. It is kicking the can down the road, avoiding accountability. It is freezing, doing nothing besides being shocked.

A lonely girl living in a world surrounded only by ghosts. Nothing reminded her of her own life more.

Derald Wing Sue. He defines microaggressions as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership.”

one of his best-selling authors, Willard Huntington Wright, better known to hundreds of thousands of readers as S. S. Van Dine.