Slavery in this land was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation, an American institution create… - Isabel Wilkerson

The researchers consider this kind of group hypervigilance to be what they call “ ‘racialized economics’: the belief that undeserving groups are getting ahead while your group is left behind.

You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said. Most Americans, we have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that? “Africans are not black,” she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.” What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them, she said. “They don’t become black until they go to America or come to the U.K.,” she said. “It is then that they become black.

They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.