Donna came from a family in which she said her mother had “extreme” views. When I asked her what she meant by “extreme,” Donna described her mother’s stance using a phrase that was not uncommon in the discourse of many white Southerners: “The only good one is a dead one.” The “one” here is, of course, a genteel metonym. It was a phrase I had heard from my grandparents as they spoke of the way white people had talked to them, growing up in the mid-twentieth-century Jim Crow South, where the law did not protect you from the terror of white supremacy but instead abetted it. The uncensored version
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