You must not only deal with familiar black persons, but with blackness per se, with blackness as a moral arc, with blackness as history and culture, with simple yet profound black humanity. You may discover after all that we, black and white, are far more alike than you suspected—or feared. Your fear that we are just alike may cause you at first to doubt, but then, defensively, to embrace the lie of black inferiority your people have practiced from the start of our experiment in democracy.
