In memory of Albert Murray I am what might be called an integrated black man. Many of my friends are white, and I live in a mostly white neighborhood; my long marriage is an interracial one, my grown children are biracial. I offer these facts neither as a lament nor as a boast. They are simply facts. Born in the 1960s, I am a member of a generation who grew up in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination and, more importantly for me, in the light of his message of openness, his call to judge one another, if we must judge one another, as individuals. That is how I have tried to live my life. In an era of the greatest divisiveness of my lifetime, what I am saying may sound hopelessly naïve, and, indeed, a few of the public responses to my work have included that word among other critical ones — one reader declared that I was merely “singing kumbaya,” another that I was speaking “nonsense.” I am not complaining. To write about so-called race is to invite an especially vehement and personal kind of criticism. The criticism has done nothing to change my view, which is that for black people to judge white people on the basis of their whiteness, however understandable that judgment may be, is to fail to grasp the most important lesson of slavery and its continuing aftermath: that the way we treat others must not depend on skin color. I will hold this view as long as I have a head to hold it in. Yet I am vividly aware that this belief in the importance of the individual is not, by itself, an adequate response to the racial challenges that we face, for two reasons. One is that this belief may seem not to take into account the sheer enormity of what was done to people of color in this country in the past, as well as its implications and ramifications for the present. The other is that this belief may have the effect of entrenching people in comfortable indifference to ongoing problems. But my purpose here is to point to two ways in which this belief in treating people as individuals can serve as a radical tool for understanding history and for addressing the challenges we face today. 
Thankfully, when it comes to American slavery, no equivalent of the Holocaust-denier movement appears to have gathered steam (which is not to say that it never will). So far no one is claiming that slavery did not happen — only that its effects on black people were not entirely bad, that the enslaved learned useful skills, to cite one argument of the Ron DeSantis crowd. I want to sidestep that argument, which is ridiculous on its face — roughly comparable to a man’s saying that, yes, he beat his wife, thereby teaching her self-defense — and widen the lens to include not just slavery and discrimination themselves but what was done to justify them, which is the true source of the trouble that plagues us to this day. A visitor from outer space, told about American slavery and left to observe the current reality, might ask why so many white people have contempt for black people rather than the reverse (not that the reverse isn’t also true — I will come to that in a bit); and the answer to the space alien, ironically enough, is white people’s egregious violation of their own sense of morality. The impetus for slavery was economic. In order to square America’s slavery with the Christian beliefs of most of America’s citizens, it became necessary for religious figures, scientists, politicians, educators, newspaper editors, editorial cartoonists, and others, like men coming together to push a stalled car, to put all of their energy into advancing the notion that whites were superior to blacks intellectually and (more irony) morally, and that whites were the rightful beneficiaries of the condition that Americans never tire of celebrating, that is, freedom. A measure of the resounding and tragic success of this campaign was that so many white people’s sense of identity came to rest on that belief in their superiority. Whatever disrupted the white sense of supremacy was considered a threat, an attack. That was true during slavery and for a century afterward, and among some whites it is true today. Hence the Tulsa massacre in 1921, in which whites decimated a thriving black business community; hence the white woman depicted in Bliss Broyard’s memoir of her father, One Drop, who researched her lineage and was reduced to tears by the discovery of her black ancestors (Broyard’s father, Anatole Broyard, was a distinguished book critic at The New York Times who passed for white); hence, as well, the way some reacted to Barack Obama’s election with the feeling of betrayal that a man might have if his wife ran off with his brother. This sense of superiority was enshrined in law, encoded in every detail and nuance of cross-racial interaction. Underneath it all, no doubt, like the pea under twenty mattresses in the fairy tale, was a feeling of guilt, remote but still felt — but one of the paradoxes of human nature is how guilt midwifes the vilest of acts. The black victims of these acts can easily be thought of as one undifferentiated, and thus not quite human, mass. Focusing on such people as individuals, however, helps us to think about the actual experiences of these victims, each one a real human being with hopes, emotions, and people who loved them, and to consider, at the human level, what these experiences meant. Pain is supremely an individual feeling. No essay, no book, no series of books could capture every instance of blacks’ suffering due to racism, so I will cite only one. Think of a woman who was owned by others and forced to breed human beings; think of a woman in your life — your mother, wife, sister,
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence