If white guilt is real, so is black guilt, though it is quite different and has its own history. Black bodies that were captured and enslaved reached American shores half dead and soaked in racial guilt. They were guilty of their blackness, guilty of being dangerously different. They were guilty of resisting the loss of their freedom, guilty of their rage at injustice, guilty of trying to escape, guilty of the insubordination of indignation. They were guilty in every way of every crime, and whiteness, in adjudicating that guilt, told itself the very same lie every abusive parent, every
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