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To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness. It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically. It is to anticipate white people’s emotions and fears and grievances, because their issues are singularly our problem. To know our whites is to survive without letting bitterness rot your soul.
People made many appeals to the right of consumption. Americans have the right to buy! It is a tenuous right indicative of our consumer society. Being a consumer, or not, should not condition your civil rights. That kind of thinking is how we end up with cruel policies that police where homeless people can sit in public or where poor people can stand without violating an ordinance. The idea is also ridiculous for how it ignores the history of black people buying wrong. Like many ideas about race, these notions are contradictory and yet live side by side in our popular imagination.
Much as we interrogate what a woman was wearing when she was raped, we look for ways to assign personal responsibility for structural injustices to bodies we collectively do not value.
understood that these were not the books you read in school, but after one had read The Diary of Anne Frank, school reading was all boys on rafts and men traversing the Canterbury Tales and wicked wives who betray their kings.
