Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains - whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

The child is a living image, in and of the present, not only a historical fact. I emphasize the imaginal child because ordinarily we assume that talk about childhood is personal history.

It is as though to put black people into fiction or to imagine them in the future would be to participate in an unseemly exercise in political balance, as though black presence could only and ever be there to represent “blackness.” He can hear himself arguing now and he dislikes the sound of it.

He had thought of Tuymans and Dumas but now he thinks of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose portraits are all of fictional persons. There is an abundance of black presence in Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings, black people who do not exist anywhere but in her paintings, paintings that may be set in the past, present, or future.

In her book The Trayvon Generation, Elizabeth Alexander, the renowned African American poet and president of the Mellon Foundation, wonders if this burden doesn’t sometimes cause a “low-grade, undiagnosed depression,” especially in the young.

He faced these conditions not because he was George Floyd the individual but because of where his identity located him in society— a location he had no choice but to contend with.

Believing that one’s moral responsibility begins and ends with seeing people as individuals tends to push identity contingencies like these out of view. It pushes us to see people in terms of internal characteristics, or what we imagine their internal characteristics to be. On the last day of George’s life, we just see a large, middle aged Black man in a tank top possibly trying to pass a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill in a corner bodega. We look for things about George the individual that could explain this— poor impulse control, a broader lack of executive self-control, dysfunctional cultural beliefs, deficits in employable cognitive skills. We downplay, or miss completely, the gauntlet of conditions tied to his race and class that he would have had to surmount in order to gain a secure connection to school, the economy, and society.