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This chapter by Laura Grattan offers an alternative to critics and admirers who equate Wright’s resistance to white supremacy and capitalism with either ressentiment or violence. Drawing on Native Son,Black Boy, and 12 Million Black Voices, the essay argues that Wright constructs a multifaceted politics of refusal that puts the regeneration of the body and its aesthetic senses at the center of struggles to create “new and strange way[s] of life.” Individual and collective transformation entails repertories of refusal that lessen attunement to an antiblack social order and that make possible generative practices necessary for freedom. The essay concludes by evaluating the creative potential of refusal in movements to abolish policing and prisons.

Chapter 3 examines how Black authors have depicted the streets in their writing and challenged anti-Black narratives associated with urban space. This chapter provides an in-depth analysis Ann Petry’s The Street, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Despite being spread across decades, these authors’ share narrative through lines about the streets.

While the myth of the Innocent Nation weaves a tale that is objectively false with no redemptive qualities, it is one of the strongest of the American myths in terms of its hold over the American people. That myth, like the nation itself, hangs suspended between the golden age of an innocent past (Nature’s Nation) and a golden age of innocence yet to come (Millennial Nation). Suspended in that vacuous state, Americans imagine that history is irrelevant. How could it be otherwise? Nothing destroys a sense of innocence like the terrors of history taken seriously. Anchored by the pillars that stand at the beginning and end of time, the myth of the Innocent Nation flourished during every modern conflict beginning with World War I, but especially when the nation faced enemies like Nazi Germany in World War II or Isis during the War on Terror. The irony was obvious, for even as the nation proclaimed its innocence, black soldiers, for example, returned from World War II only to face brutality and segregation in their own nation. Countless blacks from Muhammed Ali to Toni Morrison to James Baldwin to Ta-Nehisi Coates have protested that irony in the American myth of Innocence.

While America’s founders sought to create a nation of religious freedom, not a Christian nation, Christians in the early nineteenth century effectively Christianized the American Republic through the Second Great Awakening. Over the course of American history, many whites have accepted the claim that America is a Christian nation. Blacks from an early date, however, have argued that Christian America is a hollow concept, informed by assumptions of white supremacy. In the nineteenth century, David Walker ridiculed the notion of Christian America, while Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells claimed that the idea of Christian America was a cover for horrendous crimes against blacks. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, blacks as disparate as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and James Cone unmasked the myth of a Christian America. By the twenty-first century, the collapse of Christian dominance in the United States could be traced, at least in part, to the complicity of white American Christians in the myth of White Supremacy. Many white Christians responded by attempting to restore a lost golden age, ignoring their complicity in the myth of White Supremacy that had helped bring on America’s fourth time of trial.

This chapter considers the status of the essay in the twenty-first century as it shifts its medium from print to digital. It is argued that given the ability for the essay to speak to moments of political and social crisis, comment on and define aesthetic debates, and reflect on the meaning of individual and collective identities, it remains a crucial genre for twenty-first century African American authors. Through analyzing the work of Brittney Cooper and Ta-Nehisi Coates amongst others, this chapter illustrates how black essayists continue to work through the subject of freedom and express the will to adorn. Deploying the vernacular process, one inflected with a hip-hop beat, these authors blur the line between the digital and print, and continue to highlight the centrality of the essay to the African American literary tradition.

The American myth of Nature’s Nation claims that the United States, and especially its founding documents, owe nothing to human history but reflect the natural order as it came from the hands of the Creator. Accordingly, the Declaration of Independence speaks of “self-evident truths,” rooted in “Nature and Nature’s God.” But the founders read into the natural order the long-standing myth of White Supremacy. In this way, the myth of Nature’s Nation became a tool for exclusion and oppression of people of color. In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Thomas Jefferson even argued that black inferiority was nature’s own decree. From an early date, blacks fought back. David Walker led that charge with his 1829 book, Walker’s Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World. In the twenty-first century, other black writers—especially Toni Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates—unmasked the ways in which the myth of White Supremacy is embedded in the American myth of Nature’s Nation.

The introduction lays out the larger argument of the book which includes defining the tropes lovable racists, white messiahs, and magical negroes. The chief argument is that these tropes have long pervaded our society, reinforcing white supremacist notions of self-determination, inclusivity, nationalism, freedom, equality, and fairness. Most profoundly, these tropes encourage even blacks and people of color to not only tolerate blatant racist behavior by whites but, in many cases, to misread such behavior as laudatory. This process of misreading is the result of blacks and people color having set the bar so low for expectations of white humanity; meaning that minimal acts of white civility and decency are experienced as magnanimous or even heroic. Because whites are routinely socially insulated from having to confront their white privilege and power (a phenomenon that is compounded by the unconscious complicity of blacks and people of color), they routinely experience their white oppression and privilege as natural and benign.

This chapter introduces the broad perspective of the book on reparations, foregrounding concrete changes to our lives and institutions rather than symbolic ones. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” has been described as singlehandedly rekindling the age-old debate, setting off a firestorm of reactions across the political spectrum. Opposite Coates were detractors such as Coleman Hughes, who argues that reparations have no role to play in the changes that African-Americans need: “In 2008 the House of Representatives formally apologized for slavery and Jim Crow. In 2009, the Senate did the same. Black people don’t need another apology.” But what if the project for reparations was the project for “safer neighborhoods and better schools,” for a “less punitive justice system”? That is: what if building the just world was reparations? Indeed, this book will ask, what other form of reparations could even be meaningful in the context of our reality?

We are not seeking an expansion of economic prosperity and political rights only for ourselves as individuals, or even only for our particular social and cultural group. A society that truly values all is genuinely better for all: it overcomes the isolation and arrogance of class and race based social systems; it embodies the joy and creativity of plentitude, reciprocity, and generative interdependence.

The introduction of Calculating Race positions the process of racial formation in the context of the risk society. The relationship between race and risk stretches back to the transatlantic slave trade, an era in which enslaved Africans were insured during their voyage across the Middle Passage. Calculating Race begins with a striking account of an uprising on the ship Thames, preserved as a historical record of how the nascent insurance trade of the early modern period viewed enslaved persons as both at risk and a risk. By insuring enslaved persons against the risk of mortality and insuring the ships that carried them against insurrection, maritime slave insurance established a complex relationship between enslaved Africans and risk even before they came to the Americas. This introduction sets the stage for this relationship and previews the intersection of risk and race in the United States over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.