The Book of Delights: Essays

by Ross Gay

I’m trying to remember the last day I haven’t been reminded of the inconceivable violence black people have endured in this country. When talking to my friend Kia about struggling with paranoia, she said, “You’d have to be crazy not to be paranoid as a black person in this country.”

If you’re black in this country you’re presumed guilty. Or, to come back to Abdel, who’s a schoolteacher and thinks a lot about children, you’re not allowed to be innocent. The eyes and heart of a nation are not avoidable things. The imagination of a country is not an avoidable thing. And the negreeting, back home, where we are mostly never seen, is a way of witnessing each other’s innocence—a way of saying, “I see your innocence.”

Susan Sontag said somewhere something like any technology that slows us down in our writing rather than speeding us up is the one we ought to use.