Owning my complicity for what happens in East Knoxville, in Minneapolis, in Cleveland, in Charleston, and in the White House as a privileged white person from “the couch,” isn’t some sort of political saber-rattle or virtue signal, it’s what my inherited evangelical tradition called an act of rededication. It’s a confession, an admittance of a sinfulness that both predates and inhabits me whenever I say things like “urban,” “impoverished,” or, you know “that” part of town.
For, as James Baldwin argues, it is only when white Americans are brought face to face with the fictions underwriting “our” history, “our” worth, “our” value, “our” neighborhoods, and “our” heritage that we might finally begin questioning the crippling capitalism that has so thoroughly blinded us to the realities of the world and has left us the “slightly mad victims of (our) own brainwashing.”
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