What did he mean by “a choice of exiles”? It was a way of suggesting that he, like all black people, was already exiled from birth, because the country believed that white people mattered more. We were, in a sense, natally exiled. Because of the lie, black people were relegated through law, public policy, and social norms to the margins of American society; they were forced to struggle daily to keep from believing all that the country said about them in order to hold off madness and rage, and to resist soul-crushing sycophancy. The fact that black people were already “in but not of” America,
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