LJ: In my view, all those wonderful values are reposed on something else. We think they’re core, but they aren’t. If you take all the words you just used—all those superhero values, as you call them—and cluster them like a little galaxy on the blackboard, you can ask yourself a helpful question, which is: ‘What’s the gravitational center that holds those ideas together? What is the organizing principle, as it were, that keeps them in orbit?’ If you spend time on it, you’ll find that a productive answer is ‘individualism’ and the worth of the single person. In one way, that is very beautiful. But it’s also pretty unyielding. If you are entirely focused on the individual, you end up with blinders on for other things. Conservatives—and a lot of white people generally—cling to the idea that we’re all racially free now and we’re equal and there’s no more work to be done. Some say this because they’re racist. But a lot of them aren’t in my view. They do it because of their cherished belief in American individualism. When liberals or people of color draw attention to race, it sounds to conservatives and libertarians and individualists like we’re splitting people into groups, rather than helping them overcome the condition of being born into a group. Individualists claim to be aspiring to unity. In a twisted way, they think that focusing on and addressing racism is itself a kind of racism because it subordinates individuals to group status.
DF: So individualism is the problem?
LJ: It’s not so much a problem as a paradox, isn’t it? It’s both the problem and the solution. What we’re up against now is a conservative movement anchored in a way of seeing Americanness that says that any attention to group problems, or trying to actively support diversity through representation is actually divisive and discriminatory itself. This, by the way, is why they call liberals un-American. Any attention to group suffering or group needs is divisive in their view. People of color cry out, saying that we’re in pain, but they deny the pain and say it’s an individual pain, not a group one. They see the entire world through this individualism prism—or that’s what I call it in the article, anyway. It negates discussions of race and racism. In my view, this perspective is overpowering and insurmountable maybe because it’s deeper than race. It’s deeper than politics. It’s a culturally organizing system. It’s how we achieve Americanness. It’s how we do Americanness. It’s a kind of performance. If this is true, America can win battles against racism in court or in passing new laws and adopting new policies, but we’ll never win the war on history and circumstance because it requires people seeing with different eyes; eyes that would force them to unravel and redefine their American selves. And that’s the one thing we can’t do, because it’s the only thing that binds us all together. One can’t escape the observation that America historically enslaves groups, but only frees individuals.
He sat on this knowledge for weeks like it was a guilty secret—as though he had stolen a furtive look at her diary and knew more about her than she would ever have told him. It felt as though any look in its direction, any admission that her conclusions were real—any attention given to their racial identities—would wake them from a dream or break a spell. He wasn’t delusional about the depth of their bond, but he needed to find a way of overcoming what might be the cause of their future ending. He couldn’t look past the obvious irony: He wanted to elevate their uniqueness by negating the very history that Lydia had argued was essential to their condition. But . . . he was Norwegian. Did American race relations extend to him? Is whiteness contagious?
“How is everything?” the Canadian waiter had asked.
Marcus didn’t answer. He was watching Lydia sprinkle flaked salt on a piece of bread.
“Fine, thank you,” Lydia had said.
That is when her phone rang. The ringtone was old-fashioned, the way home phones in America used to sound. Their main courses had not yet arrived. The waiter cleared the table as she reached into her purse and checked the number.
“It’s Karen,” she whispered, the candlelight reflecting off her eyes and the phone.
Her sister. She needed to take this.
Jeffrey—with whom Marcus had played chess twice and lost, with whom he’d played Battleship once and won—had been shot by the police. He was dead.
Marcus could hear Karen choking on her grief on the phone. The sounds were pre-verbal, pre-human. Anguish.
Lydia’s impulse was to make Karen’s pain stop. As she opened her mouth to speak, though, the breathlessness entered her too. It swelled inside her, silently, and her eyes filled with tears as her free hand moved—not toward Marcus—but to her own throat. When she finally gasped for air it sounded like a valve opening and a cold wind rushed into her, filling her, and remaining there.
Marcus led her to the parking lot. In the car—in time, and once the engine started to cover the sound, she sobbed. He raised his hand to place it on her back but he didn’t dare.
In the dark, smelling of fine cologne and perfume, and rent from all capacity for speech, they drove back to the United States across the border, where the guards asked, again, if they had anything to declare.
The boys with the melted chocolate meals would be gone tomorrow, they’d said. It is just as well. It is only a matter of time, Marcus thinks, before the police arrive here; before the black helicopters appear through the rain clouds and pierce the night with their blinking red and green lights—an orange shadow aglow in their cockpits, their pilots soaring over the water like mystical demigods, whirling their blades for divine justice with
