Murph: “There is no legacy [of white supremacy] to overcome.” Know you were typing fast but the next sentence gives up the ghost. “Just how many people do you think died in the Civil War?” One thing that makes America a truly exceptional country is our history of having fought an immense civil war to end slavery. (Didn’t happen anywhere else.) But race survived the war and Reconstruction. What followed was the strange career of Jim Crow and then decades of struggle against entrenched white power structures. Did you see those black elders – I’m thinking of John Lewis in particular – as they got teary when Obama was nominated (by acclamation) at the Democratic convention? Is it possible they know something about American history that went right past you?

RE Reason and emotion – who feels it knows it? Not always but try this on – it’s by an Afro-American writer recalling his experience on the island of Goree off the coast of Senegal which was used as a way-station for slavers for hundreds of years..

“My son and I went up there in Goree… … and when we went to the slave castle and we sat up there in this dungeon with the door closed and everything, tears started coming out of our eyes. The two of us sitting there, father and son, not saying a word, just sitting there crying. Why? I don’t know. It’s just that feeling is too strong, it’s too strong…. You just sit there and suddenly, psychologically you begin to feel it on you. It’s something. You don’t want that but you start feeling it. I remember we came out of there crying and when we came out in the open, it was a group of French tourists walking towards us, and Ras says to me, what they want? What do these White people want? That thing grips you. When you come into that, when you actually come close to slavery itself – —I don’t mean stories of it, but when you actually get close to it, it will do something to you. No doubt about it. They got a hole in the wall, the door of no return and if you couldn’t make it they would just kick you aside into the ocean. A lot of the people had never seen the ocean, you know, because they were from inland. They had seen lakes. They might jump out there and think they could swim it, might think it was a lake, but that was the Atlantic Ocean and the sharks be circling down in there. Now when you conceive that and conceive that there were people upstairs over the prison, who lived there, who had a little hatch, a trap door in their floor where they could look through there and check on the slaves, you understand what I’m saying? You’ve got to be a cold mamajamma to do that. People down there [makes screaming sounds] screaming and what not, and you can pick up the door, you have your dinner and sh– upstairs and you could pick up the door and look down and see what was happening with that, well, you can’t have no feeling with that. Feeling has to be abolished. That’s why I’m saying they make that separation between the intellectual process and emotion. But I say, if you can’t feel you can’t think. That’s my feeling about that. That’s why we ask philosophers every morning, how you feel?”

Re my parenting – Hoped to slip the issue of race (as much as possible). Have a visceral distaste for, say, kids’ books/media that aim to “teach” tolerance – Always figured the best thing about living for the City was that children played their way past received notions to the truths of equality (and individuality). But race matters turn out to be a little harder to sail past than I thought. That’s (American) life, though things Change…