Sublime

Thomas Hirschhorn

“When you’re accustomed to privilege,” the saying goes, “equality can feel like oppression.”

“Racial discrimination” is an immediate and visible manifestation of an underlying racial policy.

on a visit to New York City, he saw hungry-looking men sleeping in alleyways, as if one foot were already in the grave. “These people are Les Miseràbles of America,” he wrote to his parents in September 1965. “People that don’t make it in America’s social race to succeed are simply run over.”

Concentrated poverty and violence inflict their own wounds, since neighborhoods determine so much about your life, from the kinds of job opportunities you have to…

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“The real test of every human community is how it cares for the most vulnerable, those like Angela who cannot sustain even a simulation of independence and autonomy.”

In a society in which certain people or groups—by virtue of economic, social, or political power—have dead-weight advantages over others who are essentially without that kind of power, those who are thus disadvantaged know that they cannot fight back effectively, that they cannot

Walker’s memory remained vivid among abolitionists well into the mid-nineteenth century, only to fade after the Civil War. But meanwhile, he had struck a strong blow against the notion that whiteness, throughout history, deserved to be judged positively.29

So much of the machinery of race- and/or culture-driven fear relies on who is willing to be convinced of what. How easy it is to manufacture weaponry out of someone else’s living if the emphasis is placed on the right or wrong word, or if that word is repeated enough, perhaps in a hushed tone.