Excerpted from Eve Fairbanks’s 2022 book THE INHERITORS: AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT OF SOUTH AFRICA’S RACIAL RECKONING

The stunted moral and political imaginations reflected in these types of critique are such a bummer. They don't even hold up when taken on their own, anemic terms: These ppl don't actually know what the ppl in those cars think of the action. They assume, projecting their own smallness.

And what's more, if you accept the Reasonable Interlocutor's own defense of the administration's "strategy" it literally DEPENDS on Biden's ability, in 18 days or whatever tf, to gesture apologetically at a roiling, absolute NO from the US electorate. Not polling. Shit you can see from space.

What do ppl IMAGINE it would look like for a collection of citizens effectively to say to a government that's not listening, "NO. SERIOUSLY. STOP. OVER MY DEAD BODY." What could possibly express that with greater economy and power than this action?

Read the intro. While this is ultimately a book of clinical recommendations drawn from clinical experience— and is certainly a work abt racialized and queer identities— the theoretical stuff is operating at a level of generality that feels v satisfying.