On June 27, 2015, ten days after the massacre at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Claudia Rankine published an essay on black loss in the New York Times’ Sunday magazine: “the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering,” Rankine writes; yet “[w]e live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here.”...
