It’s hard to exist and also accept my lack of existence. Frank Wilderson III, chair of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, borrows from Orlando Patterson the sociological term “social death” to explain my there-but-not-there status in a historically antiblack society. The outrage—and if we are generous, the embarrassment that occasioned the white passenger’s comment—was a reaction to the unseen taking up space; space itself is one of the understood privileges of whiteness.
