How does one come to terms with a brutal imagination by engaging and representing (over and over again) the materialization of that imagination? To stand in Gates’s and Stevenson’s “I,” “we,” “us,” and “our” requires a certain innocence and belief in, as well as a commitment to, reforming the nation. Entering this space, one is asked to assume a certain position; asked to embrace memorial narratives that offer Black suffering as a pathway to knowledge, national and “racial” healing, reparation, and reconciliation; asked to embrace a narrative that acknowledges violence only to frame it as
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