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But by the end of the early 1980s recession, the sector had lost almost 3 million jobs. Today, there are about 12 million people working in manufacturing, altogether. In the cities where these jobs were concentrated, the fallout was particularly brutal.

The high tariff wall allowed American manufacturing to introduce all available innovations into U.S.-based factories without the outsourcing that has become common in the last several decades. The lack of competition from immigrants and imports boosted the wages of workers at the bottom and contributed to the remarkable “great compression” of the income distribution during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Thus the closing of the American economy through restrictive immigration legislation and high tariffs may indirectly have contributed to the rise of real wages … and the general reduction of inequality from the 1920s to the 1950s.

What happened? The road from there to Trump is long and punctuated with many markers. But here are three significant turns: the 1968 election; the 1979 peak in manufacturing employment, and the 2008 election of Barack Obama.

In a shockingly frank 1981 interview looking back at the 1968 election, the Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained how Nixon disguised his appeal to anti-black voters in the language of economic angst. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Was the white south’s shift to the Republican column really all about civil rights? In a 2015 study, Yale University researchers drawing from Gallup surveys dating back to 1958 concluded that although southern white Democrats held racist views before the 1960s, the correlation between “conservative racial views” and “Democratic identification” disappeared after Kennedy proposed the Civil Rights Act in 1963.

Essentially, almost all of those voters became Republicans. “Defection among racially conservative whites explains all of the decline in relative white Southern Democratic identification between 1958 and 1980” and three-quarters of the decline until 2000, they concluded.

The most important American industry for most of the 20th century had been manufacturing. Once employing more than a third of the private workforce, and mostly men without a college education, manufacturing employment peaked in the summer of 1979 at almost 20 million workers.

The 1950s was a remarkable decade for blue-collar male workers. Union membership in the private sector peaked at 35 percent. The male labor-participation rate peaked in 1951. The next year, unemployment fell under 3 percent for the only period on record. Factories that once made shrapnel turned out lawn mowers and washing machines that supplied a happy migration to the suburbs. All this occurred within an economy that was uniquely closed, as the economist Robert Gordon wrote in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth:

Since 1980, the share of men between 25 and 54 who are neither working nor looking for work has increased with each passing decade. Since 1980, this figure, called the "inactivity rate," has more than doubled

Meanwhile, work has shifted toward service-sector jobs where less-educated women have fared better than men. Women without a college degree are earning more than they were 20 years ago, but since 1990, median real earnings for men without a college degree have fallen 13 percent.

nly one age-and-ethnic group is dying at higher rates than they were 15 years ago: middle-aged American whites without a college education.

. In 2004, white Republicans and white Democrats were similarly likely to say that "too much" money was spent to improve conditions for black people. Eight years later, Republicans were three times more likely to agree.

although the expression of racism by all whites toward blacks has decreased over time, "they’ve failed to decrease under Obama” among Republicans.

The reemergence of racial antagonism is concentrated among Trump supporters. Six out of ten of them think Obama is a Muslim, and only 21 percent acknowledge that the president was born in the United States.

economic anxiety can amplify racial threat effects by leading the majority to fear losing scarce resources to the rising minority. According to "group position theory,” or “group threat,” people in an ethnic majority identify with each other and feel threatened when their position in the cultural hierarchy is tenuous

Berkeley, applied group position theory to the rise of the Tea Party, arguing that racial resentment was the motor of the movement. They concluded that “the election of the first nonwhite president [and] the rising minority population have been perceived as threatening the relative standing of whites in the U.S.”

In short, scarcity triggers tribalism. Despite the long decline in racism among most American voters, prejudice is blooming where voters are most pessimistic and afraid.

Sadly, and shockingly given where the U.S. used to stand in most rankings, few of the best practices foreign leaders want to emulate are any longer in the U.S.

Young Americans who see this country from different shores can't help but conclude that something is awry in a political culture that denies what they plainly see elsewhere: health care systems that provide better outcomes at lower cost and for everyone; better airports, faster trains, more extensive urban public transportation--and even, amazingly, better highways; more upward mobility (yes, the American dream is now more real in many other countries than it is here); more sustainable energy policies; elections that work more quickly and inexpensively, with more rational discourse and greater citizen participation. The list is long.

Consider some of the things that have fueled that American lantern of attraction for more than two centuries. Perhaps more than anything else, it has been the American Dream: the universal desire of all parents that their children will lead lives better than their own. This dream was given an American name, and not just in American dictionaries. But that dream is dying. And it can't be resuscitated if talented people sit on the political sidelines or don't attend the game at all. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, only 17 percent of Americans believe our national government possesses the consent of the governed. These numbers may not seem shocking, because they've been low for so long. But not always. In 1964, Pew found 77 percent of Americans expected their government to do "the right thing" most of the time.

One of the strongest indications of American democratic dysfunction is pervasive and expanding poverty. It is not just its existence in the richest country on earth that is shameful, but its utter absence from political discourse. Most of the poor don't vote; they have largely given up hope. And what national politician talks about poverty? Can you name any? America is moving toward the kind of bifurcated society we used to deride in banana republics--rich getting richer in gated communities, while the poor grow poorer, barely seen in segregated urban ghettos and hidden rural decay. Over 20 million Americans live in extreme poverty. One in 50 Americans' only income is food stamps. Add the poor and the near-poor--that is under $44K for a family of four--and you have more than 100 million people. The richest country in the world now has the highest rate of child poverty in the developed world. The U.S. has gone from being relatively egalitarian to one of the most unequal countries in the world.

hese are just a few signs that American government is broken. So why is it so broken? Let's consider the matter of money. When I left for Oxford in 1974, the total spent by all candidates for Congress, House and Senate, was $77 million. In 2010, it was $1.8 billion. Members of Congress spend up to 70 percent of their time raising money; that is their job; they become fundraisers far more than they are legislators. In that same year, 3 percent of retiring Congressmen became lobbyists. Now it's 50 percent of Senators, 42 percent of House members. Critics from the left and right and middle alike call our political finance system one of "legalized bribery."

Comparing genomes, scientists concluded that today’s humans outside Africa carry an average of 2.5 percent Neanderthal DNA, and that people from parts of Oceania also carry about 5 percent Denisovan DNA. A study published in November found that Southeast Asians carry about 1 percent Denisovan DNA in addition to their Neanderthal genes.

This means that our modern era, since H. floresiensis died out, is the only time in the four-million-year human history that just one type of human has been alive,

as few as six couplings all those tens of thousands of years ago might have led to the current level of ancient immune alleles.

Were they romantic couplings? More likely they were aggressive acts between competing human groups, Dr. Stringer said. For a model, he pointed to modern hunter-gatherer groups that display aggressive behavior among tribes.

The value of the interbreeding shows up in the immune system, Dr. Parham’s analysis suggests. The Neanderthals and Denisovans had lived in Europe and Asia for many thousands of years before modern humans showed up and had developed ways to fight the diseases there

When modern humans mated with them, they got an injection of helpful genetic immune material, so useful that it remains in the genome today. This suggests that modern humans needed the archaic DNA to survive. The downside of archaic immune material is that it may be responsible for autoimmune diseases like diabetes, arthritis and multiple sclerosis, Dr. Parham said, stressing that these are preliminary results.

little is known about the Denisovans — the only remains so far are the pinky bone and the tooth, and there are no artifacts like tools. Dr. Reich and others suggest that they were once scattered widely across Asia, from the cold northern cave to the tropical south. The evidence is that modern populations in Oceania, including aboriginal Australians, carry Denisovan genes.

Is this film accurate? I asked Schmidt directly. “I felt as if I were having an out-of-body experience as I watched,” he said. In other words: yes.

UN estimates almost 2.3 million Syrians have fled to neighbouring countries since March 2011.

In September, Sweden became the first EU member state to offer Syrian refugees permanent residence. More than 14,000 Syrians have sought asylum there in the past two years.

ermany has resettled 1,000 refugees and plans to admit another 9,000.

the EU put forward plans to do more to stop migrants dying in the Mediterranean, after more than 350 people, many of them from Syria, lost their lives in a shipwreck off the Italian island of Lampedusa in October.

The UN has urged Western countries to take in up to 30,000 Syrians by the end of 2014.

EU leaders will consider the package on 19 December.

Ten countries have promised to allow in 12,000 people, it says, with 80% of the total pledges from Germany. France has offered 500 places and Spain 30, it says.

The harsh conditions faced by Syrian refugees have been highlighted this week with the first winter snowfalls in the Bekaa valley of northern Lebanon, where tens of thousands of Syrians are sheltering in tents.

A total of 838,000 Syrians have fled to Lebanon, living either in tented camps, unused buildings or with friends and family.

include eyewitness descriptions accompanied by borrowed footage of a fetus dying in a metal bowl

goal is to conceal the fact that late-term abortions offend the conscience when discussed or displayed with anything like journalistic accuracy

videos weren't merely "edited" but "highly edited."

the videos were "misleadingly edited" and "inaccurate."

Emancipation and reunion, the two great results of this war, were badly compromised," Goldfield says. Given these equivocal gains, and the immense toll in blood and treasure, he asks: "Was the war worth it? No."

Gary Gallagher, a leading Civil War historian at the University of Virginia, argues that the long-reigning emphasis on slavery and liberation distorts our understanding of the war and of how Americans thought in the 1860s. "There's an Appomattox syndrome--we look at Northern victory and emancipation and read the evidence backward,"

Recent scholarship has also cast new light on the scale and horror of the nation's sacrifice.

hindsight has dimmed recognition of how close the Confederacy came to achieving its aims. "For the South, a tie was as good as a win," he says. It needed to inflict enough pain to convince a divided Northern public that defeating the South wasn't worth the cost. This nearly happened at several points, when rebel armies won repeated battles in 1862 and 1863. As late as the summer of 1864,

Allen Guelzo, director of Civil War studies at Gettysburg College, adds the Pennsylvania battle to the roster of near-misses for the South

Imagining these and other scenarios isn't simply an exercise in "what if" history, or the fulfillment of Confederate fantasy fiction. It raises the very real possibility that many thousands of Americans might have died only to entrench secession and slavery.

Very few Northerners went to war seeking or anticipating the destruction of slavery. They fought for Union, and the Emancipation Proclamation was a means to that end: a desperate measure

That's changed dramatically with pioneering studies such as Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering, a 2008 examination of "the work of death" in the Civil War: killing, dying, burying, mourning, counting.

many historians, who cited the numbing totals of dead and wounded but rarely delved into the carnage or its societal impact.

J. David Hacker, a demographic historian, has used sophisticated analysis of census records to revise the toll upward by 20%, to an estimated 750,000, a figure that has won wide acceptance from Civil War scholars. If correct, the Civil War claimed more lives than all other American wars combined

"When we go to war, we ought to understand the costs," she says. "Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to forget that

"When you incorporate these elements, the war looks less like a conflict over lofty principles and more like a cross-societal bloodletting."

Just as the fight against Nazism buttressed a moral vision of the Civil War, so too have the last decade's conflicts given us a fresh and cautionary viewpoint. "We should be chastened by our inability to control war and its consequences," Brundage says. "So much of the violence in the Civil War is laundered or sanctified by emancipation, but that result was by no means inevitable."

The last century's revisionists thought the war was avoidable because they didn't regard slavery as a defining issue or evil. Almost no one suggests that today. The evidence is overwhelming that slavery was the "cornerstone" of the Southern cause,

But Lincoln's proposals for compensated emancipation fell on deaf ears, even in wartime Delaware, which was behind Union lines and clung to only 2,000 slaves, about 1.5% of the state's population.

Nor is there much credible evidence that the South's "peculiar institution" would have peacefully waned on its own.

"It was stronger than it had ever been and was growing stronger."

Most historians believe that without the Civil War, slavery would have endured for decades, possibly generations.

We are commemorating the four years of combat that began in 1861 and ended with Union victory in 1865. But Iraq and Afghanistan remind us, yet again, that the aftermath of war matters as much as its initial outcome.

Looking backwards, and hitting the pause button at the Gettysburg Address or the passage of the 13th amendment, we see a "good" and successful war for freedom. If we focus instead on the run-up to war, when Lincoln pledged to not interfere with slavery in the South, or pan out to include the 1870s, when the nation abandoned Reconstruction, the story of the Civil War isn't quite so uplifting.

In some respects, the struggle for racial justice, and for national cohesion, continues still.

Last month, it eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the country, with a market valuation of $250 billion, and Forbes deemed Mr. Bezos the fifth-wealthiest person on earth.

Others who cycled in and out of the company said that what they learned in their brief stints helped their careers take off. And more than a few who fled said they later realized they had become addicted to Amazon’s way of working.

Amazon may be singular but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims. It has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.

“Organizations are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money, either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the executioner’s blade,”

At its best, some employees said, Amazon can feel like the Bezos vision come to life, a place willing to embrace risk and strengthen ideas by stress test. Employees often say their co-workers are the sharpest, most committed colleagues they have ever met, taking to heart instructions in the leadership principles like “never settle” and “no task is beneath them.”

In contrast to companies where declarations about their philosophy amount to vague platitudes, Amazon has rules that are part of its daily language and rituals, used in hiring, cited at meetings and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime

“You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three,” Mr. Bezos wrote in his 1997 letter to shareholders

mazon, though, offers no pretense that catering to employees is a priority. Compensation

As the company has grown, Mr. Bezos has become more committed to his original ideas, viewing them in almost moral terms, those who have worked closely with him say. “My main job today: I work hard at helping to maintain the culture,”

perhaps the most distinctive is his belief that harmony is often overvalued in the workplace — that it can stifle honest critique and encourage polite praise for flawed ideas. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to “disagree and commit” (

According to early executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost from the moment he founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought sapped businesses over time — bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the company grew, he wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them proudly counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of businesses he wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared.

Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,” said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.

But in its offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do more and more. “The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff,” said Amy Michaels, a former Kindle marketer.

As the newcomers acclimate, they often feel dazzled, flattered and intimidated by how much responsibility the company puts on their shoulders and how directly Amazon links their performance to the success of their assigned projects

Every aspect of the Amazon system amplifies the others to motivate and discipline the company’s marketers, engineers and finance specialists: the leadership principles; rigorous, continuing feedback on performance; and the competition among peers who fear missing a potential problem or improvement and race to answer an email before anyone else.

many others said the culture stoked their willingness to erode work-life boundaries, castigate themselves for shortcomings (being “vocally self-critical” is included in the description of the leadership principles) and try to impress a company that can often feel like an insatiable taskmaster.

“One time I didn’t sleep for four days straight,” said Dina Vaccari, who joined in 2008 to sell Amazon gift cards to other companies and once used her own money, without asking for approval, to pay a freelancer in India to enter data so she could get more done. “These businesses were my babies, and I did whatever I could to make them successful.”

To prod employees, Amazon has a powerful lever: more data than any retail operation in history. Its perpetual flow of real-time, ultradetailed metrics allows the company to measure nearly everything its customers do:

Amazon employees are held accountable for a staggering array of metrics, a process that unfolds in what can be anxiety-provoking sessions called business reviews, held weekly or monthly among various teams. A day or two before the meetings, employees receive printouts, sometimes up to 50 or 60 pages long, several workers said. At the reviews, employees are cold-called and pop-quizzed on any one of those thousands of numbers.

Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else.

many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue

The rivalries at Amazon extend beyond behind-the-back comments. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers challenge one another “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat

Resources are sometimes hoarded. That includes promising job candidates, who are especially precious at a company with a high number of open positions. To get new team members, one veteran said, sometimes “you drown someone in the deep end of the pool,” then take his or her subordinates. Ideas are critiqued so harshly in meetings at times that some workers fear speaking up.

David Loftesness, a senior developer, said he admired the customer focus but could not tolerate the hostile language used in many meetings, a comment echoed by many others.

Each year, the internal competition culminates at an extended semi-open tournament called an Organization Level Review, where managers debate subordinates’ rankings, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a matrix projected on the wall. In recent years, other large companies, including Microsoft, General Electric and Accenture Consulting, have dropped the practice — often called stack ranking, or “rank and yank” — in part because it can force managers to get rid of valuable talent just to meet quotas.

Molly Jay, an early member of the Kindle team, said she received high ratings for years. But when she began traveling to care for her father, who was suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and weekends, her status changed. She was blocked from transferring to a less pressure-filled job, she said, and her boss told her she was “a problem.” As her father was dying, she took unpaid leave to care for him and never returned to Amazon.

“When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said.

A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”

A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.

Amazon retains new workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two years.

In interviews, 40-year-old men were convinced Amazon would replace them with 30-year-olds who could put in more hours, and 30-year-olds were sure that the company preferred to hire 20-somethings who would outwork them. A

A 2013 survey by PayScale, a salary analysis firm, put the median employee tenure at one year, among the briefest in the Fortune 500

Recruiters, though, also say that other businesses are sometimes cautious about bringing in Amazon workers, because they have been trained to be so combative. The derisive local nickname for Amazon employees is “Amholes” — pugnacious and work-obsessed.

By the time the dust settles in three years, Amazon will have enough space for 50,000 employees or so, more than triple what it had as recently as 2013.

just as Jeff Bezos was able to see the future of e-commerce before anyone else, she added, he was able to envision a new kind of workplace: fluid but tough, with employees staying only a short time and employers demanding the maximum.

“Amazon is driven by data,” said Ms. Pearce, who now runs her own Seattle software company, which is well stocked with ex-Amazonians. “It will only change if the data says it must — when the entire way of hiring and working and firing stops making economic sense.”

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies

It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth

ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.

The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.

I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood

The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.

still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies

I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed

When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.

Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.

erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped

this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?

now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.

“Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.

The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.

I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons

here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.

Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.

I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.

American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.

I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.

It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.

“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.

There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.

I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have

I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.

“I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.

the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.

You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life

I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.

I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

Life moves on. As the poet James Russell Lowell once put it more than a century ago: "New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth." I am ready now to claim the victory. I will from now on assume it and live into it. I am unwilling to argue about it or to discuss it as if there are two equally valid, competing positions any longer. The day for that mentality has simply gone forever.

it's not so much the actual lack of control--but obsessing over lack of control--that's the cause of anxiety.

Is it true that more "rational control" we have, the more anxious we are?  Maybe that's because each of us is stuck with knowing how much the very future of one's own being is in one's own hands.  We're stuck with being control freaks, always calculating--nervously or anxiously--about our personal security. 

We're the people least likely to relax and let God or nature take its course.  That fact, like most facts about social transformation, is both good and bad.  But who can deny that it does anxiously rob us of the happiness or contentment we can enjoy right now. Is it harder than ever to be happily in love with or in the moment? 

We might be looking forward to a future with people blessed by technology with indefinite longevity obsessing over their lack of immortality.

The economists are right that there are certain advantages to deferred gratification and having a really expanded time horizon. But probably happiness isn’t one of them.

Saving Private Ryan offers not a single word about love of country. Generals may still talk like their Civil War counterparts, but soldiers in the field have ceased to cloak their duty in such sentiments.

The mission can't be justified on moral or patriotic grounds, and yet the toughest soldier in the squad, Sergeant Horvath, says saving Private Ryan might be the one decent thing they "were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess."

Spielberg never suggests that we are any better than our enemy or, to put it more generously, that they are any worse than we are.

this is not a patriotic film; if anything, it argues that patriotism is beside the point in modern warfare. Even the mission itself has no heroic or patriotic aim; there is no hill to be taken, no redoubt to be stormed. Its goal, according to Captain Miller, is public relations.

there is no shortage of cruelty and brutality. Nazis move through battle-scarred streets indifferently finishing off wounded Americans, but, early in the film, we have witnessed callous GIs mowing down surrendering Germans with a laugh.

Schindler's List and Amistad are, in fact, about guilt and responsibility. They are not, as many imagine, noble memorials to the millions of victims of the Holocaust and slavery; rather, they are agonized meditations on all of those somehow implicated in those vast human tragedies.

How can the sentimental tableau of a weeping old man, his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, and his grandchildren possibly serve as a fit conclusion to so savage and unsentimental a film?

he described his father's own war stories: "I was supposed to wave the flag and be patriotic and say that without his efforts I wouldn't have the freedoms I had or even the freedom to have the bicycle I was riding." Only later did the director realize that it wasn't "a bunch of bunk he was telling me."

Private Ryan, a dazed kid surrounded by the bodies of men who were absurdly ordered to their deaths to save him, is given the equally absurd command by the dying hero, Captain Miller, to "earn this" and must now bear the terrible, impossible order until his own death.

at the end of Saving Private Ryan, as a grandfather and his son and grandchildren pay homage to those whose deaths we have just witnessed, the living are called not merely to bear witness to the achievement of fallen heroes; the living are, in fact, the achievement itself. Like Private Ryan, we cannot help but ask what we've done to deserve such sacrifice by others and beg their forgiveness for what we have cost them. And like James Ryan, all we can do to justify that sacrifice is to live our lives as well as we are able.

Saving Private Ryan is not about those who suffered; it is about those who have been spared suffering. Spielberg's subject, in the end, is not the courage of the soldiers who fought at Normandy; his subject is the debt owed them by their children and their children's children.

America’s first great victory in the war was a costly one. The Marines alone took more casualties in those three weeks than they had in the entirety of their existence. Private Lee was shot through the wrist on June 12; Captain Williams was killed that same day. There are 2,288 men buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, just behind the woods. Almost four times as many are buried in the much smaller German cemetery nearby.

Belleau Wood looks today much as it did in 1918, and presents visitors to this part of the country with their best opportunity to get a sense of what it was like during the war. It is filled with trenches, shell holes and fox holes, so many that no one ever bothered to put up signs pointing them out. The cemetery staff has in recent years blazed a walking trail through the forest and has printed a self-guided tour. It starts at a visitors’ area with a statue and lots of retired big guns, then moves into the woods. Trenches meander right alongside the path; it’s easy to envision it all — the shooting, the shelling, the hunkering and praying and dying.

A contract was written into the deeds of this old French manor house, stipulating that its future owners keep Hubert's room as it is for 500 years. The contract is not legally binding, and Mr Fabre says he's not sure whether the room will survive another 400 years, but his little grand-daughter, giggling over a ashtray fashioned out of a horse's hoof, tells us she for one would never change it.

In the past, drug abuse deaths were more common in middle-aged blacks than in middle-aged whites. Now they are more common in whites. The same pattern holds for deaths from alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver. The suicide rate for whites was four times that of blacks.

Could people be taking drugs and killing themselves as a response to the economic slowdown? Maybe. But, if so, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case said, then why aren’t people in other countries responding the same way?

the people who report pain in middle age are the people who report difficulty in socializing, shopping, sitting for three hours, walking for two blocks.

older people are actually doing better — less addiction, disability rates falling.

how much of what they are seeing might be attributed to the explosive increase in prescription narcotics.

Recent reports of illness and disability might provide some clues. More middle-aged whites report that their general health is not good; and, more report chronic pain

Dr. Deaton envisions poorly educated middle-aged white Americans who feel socially isolated are out of work, suffering from chronic pain and turning to narcotics or alcohol for relief, or taking their own lives. Starting in the 1990s, he said, there was a huge emphasis on controlling pain, with pain charts going up in every doctor’s office and a concomitant increase in prescription narcotics.

Dr. Deaton noted that blacks and Hispanics may have been protected to an extent. Some pharmacies in neighborhoods where blacks and Hispanics live do not even stock those drugs, and doctors have been less likely to prescribe them for these groups.

So we're all the same after all.Under the right conditions - no control over your life, low pay, no job, little in the way of job prospects, no healthcare, little education, families break down when the man can't be the breadwinner, and then along comes poor health, substance abuse, depression, despair - all those ills that were blamed on black people's supposed lack of morals.Now that white kids are dying of heroin we need to change the laws, end the war on drugs, legalize pot, and change how we talk about what were formerly known as 'junkies'.White men are in despair as a result of economic problems, white kids are doing hard drugs in numbers that everyone's starting to notice, and AIDS is plaguing white communities, and now we need to care. So we're all human?

Because white people are depressed over their diminution in society by the policies of the Federal Government, the education system, racial animosity and biased media outlets that are rampant through the society. These doctors are clueless liberals that will try to find any reason to blame, other than the truth. It's not the drugs, it's what is causing them to want the drugs. White males have been denigrated for the past 50 years. The effects have to be building up and weighing on them.

John is a trusted commenter Boston 6 hours ago No, their diminution in society came from globalized capitalism. A lot of these working class white people were Reagan voters. I'm the same age as them, I saw it happen. They thought they were getting "Morning in America" but instead they got morning for Walmart and sunset for the working class. That's enough to make anybody turn to pills and booze.

DougH Lithonia, GA 7 hours ago To some extent, it's of their own making. High school educated whites tend to vote Republican. Over the last 30 years, Republicans have sold them a bill of goods. They abandoned unions, opposed increases in the minimum wage, and opposed regulation, including safety, wage fairness, etc.So now they are paid less. They have no way of changing that (short of high education) and the big beneficiaries of lower taxes have been the businesses and owners that for which they work. Did those owners bless the workers with the fruits of their benefits? Of course not. They kept the reduced expenses as profit, increased CEO wages, and kept cutting benefits before finally shipping their jobs overseas.Perhaps, if they stopped voting against their own interests, they would fair better.

dw659 Chicago 8 hours ago Why? Simple. Because to males, a 'loss of control' is an unacceptable change. 200 years of being 'in control' just because you are born white and male is ending. Many men can't face a world where they are of 'lower status' than women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc. They don't want to live in that world.....

dale south africa 5 hours ago Its true ! I am a conservative man and i live i johannesburg. I cant imagine what it must be like respecting all things under the suns . From females, gays blacks etc Children of slaves dictating societies . oprah picking presidents. the bully is not allowed to be at his natural best and strongest with this new liberal socialist agenda , everyone equal attitude. im not white but if I was who would want that

Linda is a trusted commenter Oklahoma 54 minutes ago I know so many white men in this small town I live in who never had anything to do with their children. They didn't care about anybody through their productive years and now they're surprised that nobody cares about them.

AC USA 5 hours ago Could it be because these guys have no close family ties? They are the ages that their parents are probably in nursing homes or already passed away. These blue collar, high school educated guys fathered unwanted children with women to whom they may or may hot have been married and divorced. But now at middle age comes time for them to feel wanted and valued by their progeny (dad, dispense some life wisdom to us, help us with college, getting married, a down payment on a house, take your grand-kids fishing, etc.), but they dumped their kids by not wanting to pay child support, or having a bad attitude and not helping their kids at all past age 18. So they kids moved on without dad's love and "support" (monetary or emotionally). The "all for myself mentality" they have espoused has finally come home to roost. There is no going back in time, they are all alone, have no purpose as jobs are hard to come by at that age - even more-so blue collar ones - so they drink/take pills to dull the pain, then overdo it.

suzinne bronx 5 hours ago Think white families more often DO NOT stick together. At middle age and white, have ZERO contact with any family members. By the time I was 16 most had died, moved away or become estranged. Know this amps up my chances for suicide, and that's probably going to pan out too. Flag

Paul '52 is a trusted commenter NYC 2 hours ago The is the first cohort to experience the phenomenon that if you do the same job as your parents you won't do as well or better. These are the auto workers, the airport baggage handlers, the truck drivers. They are, in fact, more productive than their fathers, but they're not paid as well and they don't have pensions. And the disappointment is taking its toll.