There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing - race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy - serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

I now interrupt myself with a small but crucial consideration, because now that I’ve said it several times, I realize that I am troubled by the title Slave Ship. It’s the word “slave”: a word which still strikes the ear like a lash. There are those who enslave others and there are those who are enslaved by others. But there’s no one whose essence or true description is “slave.” A person can be enslaved, can be trapped in the death-in-life known as slavery, but that is not who they are. It is something intolerable that is happening to them or that happened to them. For this reason I think that part of the original title is more accurate: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying.

One wrong move could be fatal and so no one makes a wrong move. It is the reason a stranger should never set out into the city without a native guide. Some cities have a plan, a diagram of the city before its founding, or a map, a schematic representation of the city as it now is. Not this city. The choreography that keeps it going would be amazing could it be seen in a single encompassing moment. That is not possible in a city which changes faster than it can be described and which tolerates cartography only on a scale of 1:1.

But on returning to the city he found it grim and was tempted to call it a post-traumatic landscape except that would have suggested the trauma was in the past. It is a city of unspoken sufferings: the wordlessness of the disappeared dissidents, the blankness at the other end of the blackmailer’s phone line, the hush after a lynching, the shiver after a beating, the abyss following child abuse, the stillness after a murder, the muteness after a rape, the long-held hopes that vanish as soundlessly as a drop of water on velvet.

And anyway, how different finally is this character from so many others? He is only one of the many heroic or heroized white characters who commit crimes that are not figured as crimes because the crimes are committed against foreign nobodies. But no, no, I have to stop making excuses for what I find upsetting. I have to respect the part of myself that is upset by what is upsetting. Halfway through the second of five seasons I stop watching.

There is the great suffering that is an intrinsic part of love, the love of one’s work, the love of the world, and of humanity. There is the unbargained-for cost of telling stories — the hounding by dictators, military leaders, spy networks, secret services, all those with their own agendas, all those who like or dislike only through the screen or filter of their ideologies or insecurities. There are other costs — the death-threats, the enmities incurred by the innocence of the word, the demons of rivalry, the degrading competition which leads the best practitioners, if they submit, away from their beautiful journey.