Status Updates From Who Will Pay Reparations On...

"This generation... may find themselves, as we so often have, echoing Morrison herself, who said in praise of James Baldwin at his funeral, 'In your hands language was handsome again. In your hands we saw how it was meant to be: neither bloodless nor bloody, and yet alive" (28).

"Do not, [Morrison] commends her audience, trust any one political party to combat this drift toward creating 'others' out of neighbors. It will make no difference who is in power, if in the end we are only interested in building a bunkered future, a siloed desert without social intercourse and mutual conversation, a world with quantified convenience but no qualitative conviction..." (27)

"To have such an attitude toward the future we would need a common mission... we would need a humanism. 'It will require,' [Morrison] concludes, 'thinking about the quality of human life, not just its length. The quality of intelligence life, not just its strategizing abilities. The obligations of moral life, not just its ad hoc capacity for pity" (27).

"Finding those places where things pop is the central task of {Morrison's] humanism, which she calls ... the act of 'self regard.' Self-regard, Morrison insists, is the process in which we recover ourselves — in which we once again become human. It means experiencing black culture 'from a viewpoint that precedes its appropriation'; it means seeing humanity after the veil of otherness has fallen" (26).

"Brilliant though he was, Velàzquez was nonetheless limited by his position as master. There were some things very near to him, things in fact essential to his own success, and indeed to that of his royal patron, that he could not see. Velàsquez had the tools of a master. He didn't have the vision of the slave" (21).

"My question is this: Even if we wanted to, do we know how to read a slave's 'masterpiece'? I'm not asking whether a slave is capable of producing one, but rather what kinds of rhetorical and aesthetic claims such a work can make...

... And further down the corridor of time, what can he tell us about our own?" (14)

"Velàsquez took a selfie of the entire idea of European mastery as it clicked into place. In his masterpiece, we see the rulers discovering how to make their own project legible to themselves. This is the nature of my power, the painting says, I am the natural subject of history, the center and master of the universe" (14).

"Foucault's rhetorical strategy is to mirror the bravura of the painting in his own prose, ... Their displays of mastery articulate how power can command fealty using tools that, at first blush, appear to be simply elegant, humanistic expressions of high culture (14)."

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