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There is somebody in all of us. This fact is our shared experience, our shared category: the human.
If it is a humanism, it is a radical one, which struggles toward solidarity in alterity, the possibility and promise of unity across difference.
That people live and die within a specific history—within deeply embedded cultural, racial, and class codes—is a reality that cannot be denied, and often a beautiful one. It’s what creates difference.
Fascism labors to create the category of the “nobody,” the scapegoat, the sufferer. Morrison repudiated that category as it has applied to black people over centuries, and in doing so strengthened the category of the “somebody” for all of us, whether black or white or neither. Othering whoever has othered us, in reverse, is no liberation—as cathartic as it may feel.[*13]