Eventually, Bob came to the conclusion that, as a group, white people suffer from a malady that he calls the “shriveled-heart syndrome.” It is rooted in the experience of white people enslaving black people. “Slavery is an act of war,” Bob said. “You can’t maintain it without violence.” If black people were to be kept in slavery, they had to become an enemy. That meant cutting off any empathy that arose from witnessing the suffering of a fellow human being.
