You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance - no matter how improved - as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children.

It is of critical importance to recognise that for people who regard themselves as having no recourse to better their lives, the exercise of violence proves an intoxicating surrogate. Shame - despite its origins in the self - is an excruciatingly public emotion. To feel it is to feel oneself a reprobate. Overcompensation through personal achievement is not an option. When a person feels judged - hounded - by the jury that is public opinion, the only way to exorcise that feeling is to eliminate the jury altogether. In the mind of the perpetrator, transferring one’s own suffering onto another human being becomes a viable - almost noble - moral calculus, turning the master-slave dialectic on its head.

“And the rejection is what people can’t understand. This wasn’t a “found out my husband or my wife is leaving me for another person,” or “my best friend has betrayed me” type of rejection. This was a rejection by the world of my very existence. That you are not a human being in the way the world understands human beings to be. It was feeling like you were being wiped off the map of humanity. I did not have the language then to explain that. I barely have it now.

Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of at the time that we are reading. How obvious the thought seems once it has been articulated! As with love, politics, or friendship: readiness is all. When a book of merit is trashed upon publication, or one of passing value praised to the skies, it is not that the book, in either case, is being read by the wrong or the right people, it is that the wrong or the right moment is being intersected with. This book, good or great though it may be, sinks like a stone because what it has to say cannot be taken in at the moment; while that book, transparently ephemeral, is well received because what it is addressing is alive—now, right now—in the shared psyche. Which is perhaps as it should be. The inner life is nourished only if it gets what it needs when it needs it.

Lerner argued as follows: To feel comfortable in the world, we need to believe the world is basically just— that generally people get what they deserve. Thus when we see a person suffering for little reason, it upsets us by implying that maybe the world isn’t just. And to restore that injured image, we might actually derogate such a victim— blame them for their suffering— as a way of restoring our needed belief that the world is just, and that people do in fact get what they deserve.

In one of the most surprising findings in the history of social psychology, this is just what happened. Subjects derogated the victim, downgrading her personality and character.