Sublime

Emma Goldman.

Once again, the nation’s most prestigious center of learning would play a pivotal role in race theory.

race, which wasn’t invented until the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.

Jefferson in his racist generosity allowed that some infusion of European ancestry afforded Africans somewhat greater capacity, but it is quite clear he would have found me, credibly 81 percent African, lacking. I hold instead to what W. E. B. Du Bois said: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balz

The early twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber says it well. While the nobility believe their superiority grows out of their “underived, ultimate, and qualitatively distinctive being,” no one in favored circumstances wants to admit the chanciness of privilege. “The fortunate man,” Weber says, “is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate

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

Over time, Goethe’s prestige made ancient Greek intellectual superiority so dominant that German intellectuals began to claim ancient Greek bodies and culture as their true ancestors.

W. E. B. Du Bois taught us this, and we teach it to our students. Whiteness was offered as a promise. Precarity makes it less sturdy. There are White people who work hard all of their lives and Whiteness gives them little materially. On the other hand, there are White people who come from powerful edifices, who can point to paintings on Vanderbilt’