Seven years ago, in the gauzy afterglow of a stirring election night in Chicago, commentators dared ask whether the United States had finally begun to heal its divisions over race and atone for the original sin of slavery by electing its first black president.
Grant the metaphor this much: it is an attempt, sort of, to understand contemporary racist violence historically. However, after the common fashion of what James Baldwin often described as American “innocence,” it approaches this history by piously evading it. Original sin is a sin, after all, for which no atonement is ever possible; it is also impossibly confusing. Slavery as original sin is a foggy, opaque mystery, buried in the southern soil, knotted in the wisteria vines, mired deep inside the networked rabbit holes of the Catechism and the Protestant doctrines of original sin, rabbit holes I am only now beginning to claw my way out of as I draft this essay.
