Trump cracked open an ugly American white secret that previous racist presidents managed to conceal, deny, or massage. The public cracking culminated with George Floyd, a moment when white America could watch racism in action of 8 minutes of police murdering a black man begging for his life, crying for his mother as the white policeman who took his last breath, looked at the camera with all the arrogance of legal protection that we have granted him.

White America and the rest of the world could see this secret, legal brutality against black America and grasp a more profound truth about this country: that all along it has nurtured practices that under the wrong elected regime could topple its democracy. What we saw is democracy’s fragility. We realized that we were complicit in the undoing of democracy while supposedly lauding and singing its praises. Since the murder of George Floyd we began to experience the truth that the city on the hill was lip service, a self-deceptive lie, that the “city” was, and has been, a gated community of institutions that protected the power of privileged rich white men. read more

“Geography here is everything,” writes Colum McCann on the first page of Apeirogon. The phrase recurs throughout McCann’s remarkable, compulsively readable new novel.  (BTW, an apeirogon is a polygon with an infinite number of countable sides.) The “here” is the Jerusalem and West Bank of the present and recent past, of the First and Second Intifadas, of Netanyahu’s unending reign of misrule, and of quagmires new and old. A sense of claustrophobia pervades McCann’s novel. It is a place of constricted and narrowed geographies and of intellectual claustrophobia as well; where the political options impinge and jostle one another, like cars vainly trying to pass one another on one of those tight roads in Palestinian communities only one car-width wide; a world where familiarity has bred a contemptuous and sometimes murderous understanding of “the other.” read more