There was something insecure about that chimera too, about whoever had engineered it. To construct what amounts to a wall of devouring, you must be really afraid of something. Maybe that’s what happens when annihilation is no longer speculative but a fact of national and personal history. That’s the easy answer. The more disturbing one is that this wall represented nothing new, that it was no more spectacular than the rituals of lynching, that the mob too was insecure, that its rituals too spoke to white men’s violent impotence. And oddly enough, I had the same feeling as I left the City of
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