Ordinary Notes

by Christina Sharpe

What if the project that white people took up was to locate each of the white people who appear in the crowds of those lynchings, those who posed for photographs and those others who appear in the background? What if their project was to identify them and their families and to link their present circumstances to the before of those photographs and the after? That is, what if the work was to draw a line or to map new or continued wealth, accumulation of property and status, access to education and health to those mass murders—a Legacy of Lynching Participants database—that would join the past and the present in the same ways that the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project laid bare the “slave owners”—their strategies of accumulation of wealth and power, evasion and disavowal, that have continued into the present.