Crow Jane doesn’t saythe sun’s gonna shine in her back door someday or lament motherless children or keen for those murdered in the streets, but she does assure us that a better day is coming, that the arc of empire bends toward justice. That progress, although sometimes painful, is inevitable. As the crisis unfolds, she humbly proposes a plan, perhaps not worthy of the attention of our esteemed audience, because it consists only of modest suggestions, a handful of her thoughts and ruminations for saving democracy, a task to which she is selflessly devoted even if it requires her to lick all the pots in sorrow’s kitchen. She proffers a remedy for what can’t be repaired, exhorts us to be patient. She goads us to believe what we cannot, eschewing everything we know and imploring us to forget. With brevity and poise, she insists we pin our hopes to the project. She remains confident that this remarkable journey we as Americans have embarked upon will be triumphant. Imperial dreams are as unstoppable as wars without end, as manifest destiny, as lebensraum, as the divine mission of the settler state. An eternal empire hearkens to the future. We are all on the same team, she coaxes, ignoring the fissures and chasms, the divisions between citizens and animals. We stand united until we are not, until the bloodbath, until democracy itself is on trial. She forgets it has always been on trial for some of us, while most of us have never experienced it. Crow Jane finds such rhetoric tedious, crude assertions of the intellectually lazy and the identity extremists, a poor substitute for rigorous thought and incontrovertible evidence.

Optimism is never cruel, she quips, but a requirement for living. It is this good faith that makes our republic exceptional and has propelled us forward since 1619. Even a word as anemic as justice doesn’t figure in her solution to the problem of race relations, her plan for saving the empire. It is imperative to unify the divided nation (in a more old-fashioned parlance — the Negro or Native problem). She offers threadbare homilies about lesser evils, institutional neutrality, pragmatic actions, realist solutions, rational discourse, the imminent dangers facing the West and menacing its borders. It goes without saying that she abhors the violence of the dispossessed. The goal, repeated ad nauseam, is to rekindle the American spirit, which has been tested in recent crises. Rights and reform are words that portend a brighter future, unlike abolition or reparation or sovereignty or return, which stymie and derail the conversation every time. At hand is a trove of facile advice, DIY instructions for averting the disaster and surviving the predation, if only by disavowing it — even as we are knee-deep in it. Glock 43Xs, AR-15s, bunkers, citizen militias, settler confederations, red ribbons, nooses, swastikas, bones and scalps, cherished mammies, redface mascots, and Black lawn jockeys are part of the American spirit too, so we must learn to coexist peacefully with our differences and embrace neighbors who dream of our extermination. Her untiring optimism and dogged innocence are performatives necessary to fortify the nation, our democracy.

America is beautiful, incomparable, and Crow Jane believes she can rescue it. At least 62 percent of white nationalists might still be converted to pluralism or convinced that human rights don’t threaten or depreciate the value of the Aryan. In the aftermath of the evil and wicked traffic and the way of death and the Trail of Tears, she remains steadfast: there is an antidote for the transubstantiation of the poor white into the planter oligarch and state executioner, a corrective for every white citizen who internalizes the power of the police, each day reinforcing the barrier between the governable and the disposable. As if the plot against America isn’t America, as if fungibility were a shared condition. As if the next time, the president-elect might induce the patriots and supremacists to change their minds and not storm the Capitol or fire on Fort Sumter, not embrace the boogaloo and the bloodbath, and allow us to live; and after the genocide, he might stand heroically against the murder of innocents and proclaim with the necessary gravity: it’s over the top. As if this is the most we could hope for, or all that we should want.

Crow Jane’s lecture is a composition deracinated from the field and choked with the language of the covenant. It is reasoned, measured, never strident, to ensure its reception by those who are not inclined to heed any truths dropped from sooty lips, who prefer to talk about the weather as we are dying, who espouse civility as the tanks roll into the city, who demand the exchange of ideas without antagonism or unrest, those for whom conquest is encounter and slavery a training school for Negroes, those who are accustomed to dictating the terms of address, those who possess the power to deaccession your ass in a minute. Yet, in her case, they prove willing to suspend, if only temporarily, the rules of engagement, the visceral disbelief in any worldview but their own, in any standpoint hostile to their determined chains of meaning, and cede to the native informant’s predictable babble. Fortunately, she has been educated at the most elite schools, so the master’s episteme is her own. Like the quiet storm, her modest proposal is easy listening, nothing but legible speech without any discordant tones or ugly feelings; it is assimilable, digestible, delectable as good Negroes are wont to be. The so articulate delivery extends the reassuring comfort of the familiar, mammy fascism, statecraft in black- and brownface. No hue and cry. No fuck it, no burn it down, no program of complete disorder, no rebellion, no unrepentant destruction. Just this metaphorical aptitude, this figurative capacity or talent for becoming whatever is required, or nobody at all. Just the tender gift of reproductive labor in service of the order, the welcome of her beautiful humiliation, the betrayal of her volition, the dulcet tones of submission, the vow to wait, to keep waiting and waiting until oblivion. The propensity to endure until hardly any of us is left standing, just the appeal, father may I, master may I, man may I, which is so much better than any pledge of allegiance.

Crow Jane delights in the invitation to the table. If you don’t have a seat at the table, she quips, then you’re the lunch.

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Like other realists, Crow Jane wastes no time on imagining a state change, a new set of arrangements, but rather devotes herself to the likely, the probable, the parameters of the given. An Ivy League degree and $100,000 in student debt have translated her forebears’ incisive critique — same shit, different day — into her own eloquent holding pattern, a dicty expression of servitude disavowed. Though loath to admit it, in her heart of hearts, she believes the order is eternal. The admission hurts, yet is not without a small consolation — why even try to create something different, why waste the effort? The gift of pragmatism is a profound tolerance of the unlivable. The paradox is that she makes her living as a changemaker, analyzing the problem and proposing solutions for transformation, albeit incremental. In crude terms, she nips and tucks the racial order. 2020 was a watershed year. Her client list grew exponentially, as did her investment portfolio. She penned solidarity statements for the Fortune 500, drafted thousands of diversity-and-inclusion pledges, waxed poetic about the compassion of J.P. Morgan, Barclays, HSBC, and Lloyds, about the long history of their investments in the Black community. A feature on white fascists and their love of their Black children earned her a finalist spot for the Pulitzer.

For a robust six figures, she helps institutions navigate the turbulence produced by rabble-rousers and the ungrateful, anarchists and militants, and sometimes, surprisingly, even upstanding citizens. If pushed to the wall, even decent, hardworking folks might relish the sight of a police precinct engulfed in flames, or celebrate the vision of their oppressors quaking in fear. She doesn’t permit herself to consider whether her life might be better if she weren’t the Associate Director of Diversity and Inclusion or a Title IX officer, especially since most of those she takes to task for intolerance or hate speech are the university’s most recent arrivals. Why can’t the ethnic studies professors and the DACA students just shut their mouths and do their work? Why can’t they uphold the values of the university instead of attacking them? Sadly, their arrival on campus signals the death of liberal ideals.

This line of work comes naturally to her. Her father had worked his way up from an FBI informer to a big muckety-muck at the Department of Housing and Urban Development; he made his reputation by eliminating more housing units in one year than had been created in the previous two decades. The demise of the Black Panther Party had enabled him to purchase a modest ranch-style home for his family in a less fashionable section of the Oakland Hills. It was a time before influencer mansions and media deals and multimillion-dollar anti-racism centers and BLM hedge funds. Unlike her father, Crow Jane was no Judas goat, at least not at first — she really did intend to make things better, if only by being a positive role model for her race, a star of the flock, the native most fluent in the language of Man.

Crow Jane has mastered the art of appeal and persuasion, regaling audiences with tales of American opportunity, of how she resisted drugs and pregnancy and Afropessimism, advancing by her own merit. Or she enchants them with stories of her unworthiness: she was lazy and received opportunities she didn’t deserve, and this hurt her, but eventually she learned to work as hard as her white colleagues. Now (that she got hers), Crow Jane advocates for the end of affirmative action.

Her broad, warm smile opens doors. A bear hug can do the job just as well when her words fail, or the environment is too hostile for speech. She can recite verbatim the chronicle of the four hundred years of transformation from captive to citizen, from tool to worker to felon. She notes key dates when our recognition as human beings was injured if not negated entirely, while gracefully balancing the promise of the world’s oldest, greatest democracy against the peril of being permanently marked as commodity and slave. Yet in this terrible history she discerns the working of Providence.

Lavish praise is heaped on the wealthy and powerful, thanked for their generosity and small mercies, the extracted wealth parsimoniously redistributed. She thanks the donors more than Jesus because they have opened the floodgates for her enrichment, allowing her to retire from the Manhattan Institute and create her own firm, Hemings Equity Partners™, guided by the dictum Nigra libertas, patronatus albus. Amen to that.

At the Aspen Institute, Crow Jane explains structural inequality to the millionaires. The billionaires opt out; they don’t do woke.

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She whets the appetites of the 1 percent, the great soaring predators, the towering figures, the rulers of men, the owners of Earth who still remember the stories whispered by fathers and grandfathers behind closed doors, tales of delectable flesh and rare copies of the collected works of de Sade bound in the hide of a Negress, or who fondly recall their first blue movie, Gone to the Quarters, in which Rhett and Mammy get down. Crow Jane, outfitted in her thigh-high patent leather boots, effortlessly conjuring Patsy as ur-Negress and dominatrix until they are frenzied with rage and lust and want to destroy anything with a vagina, or sack and impale a she-male. They beg to feel her stiletto against their throats.

Crow Jane plays the part, the vainglorious servant in the house, shucking and jiving, not putting on ole master, but dissembling before us, trying to teach field Negroes the meaning of hegemony and its possibilities, instilling the idea that the plantation belongs to us too. How one day we might inherit it. How we have the power to make it more humane. Later that evening, she kicks it with the master, downing a glass of his best bourbon in one swallow, her diamond earrings and Gucci Horsebit Chains incongruous with the osnaburg dress and the indigo headscarf covering her plaits, looking every inch the part, a planter’s pinup, the bondage-and-domination imago, the role-play: the frightened, humiliated captive trembling in front of the white master or the rebellious slave in need of correction. In the moonlight, it can’t be denied, how Dark & Lovely, how radiant the exemplary slave.

She narrates the once upon a time from 1619 to the Voting Rights Act, explicating the origin of racism. No, it wasn’t stamped from the beginning, progress is inevitable, merit is the best equalizer, how far we have come. Who could have anticipated the day when the name of a Black woman would be inscribed on an oil tanker? Her proposal concludes on the upbeat: as it stands, depeopled, a great nation.

To earn her keep, she learns to spin the problem in new ways and generate new products, from how-to books to a line of apparel. Escrava Anastacia on the new Converse and Solomon Northup on T-shirts and a line of urban sportswear with the slogan refusal. Even the Fondazione Prada is doing Black Study, and the Ethnological Museum has incorporated native perspectives in the wall text to contextualize their loot and disarm those demanding the return of human remains. She drafts a statement of restitution, but in the small print the museum and the university assert their rights to the bones. A series of grand pronouncements to do better and try harder masks the new idioms of predation and the same ole routines of theft and destruction.

It feels good to be a role model, she reflects. Young people need examples they can emulate, otherwise they risk nihilism. Melancholy historicism, as has been documented by several big-data projects on the counterintuitive ratio between happiness and hunger in the Global South, is an obstacle to upward mobility and success. The morality tale about her crackhead sister, her cousin Pookie, and her death-dealing nephew Bar-b-que goes over well with the conservatives. On special occasions, at a Juneteenth celebration or a mass funeral, she might even hum a few bars from “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” or sing off-key “Lift Every Voice and Sing,”in homage to her community.

What is to be done? the audiences clamor. She indulges them, knowing they don’t want an answer. Just words of comfort, the given arrangement clad in a fresh guise, and vague earnest gestures pointing to a path forward. They leave sated. When called to appear before a congressional body assembled to address the most recent crisis, and after due consideration of the terrible events — the mass killings, the plagues, the immiseration, the war, the camps, the boats — with the obligatory gravity, she advises: The first task is to establish a commission to study the problem. The white paper, released with pomp and circumstance, offers a road map detailing the long course ahead, the slow steady road to change, what will be required of all of us as Americans and citizens. Reform is within reach, and it need not be uncomfortable or jeopardize our way of life.

Crow Jane has become an expert in speaking in a clipped, brisk cadence, in a sonorous tone, with a dusky, enchanting timbre. No slipped Rs or Gs, but a sleek technical presentation with PowerPoint, statistical tables, and re(tro)gression analysis, which rouses the audience, inducing satisfied grins and short-lived paradigm shifts. Roses are thrown onto the stage, and the stampede of applause lasts for several minutes. The mob loves her. But even if they booed and threw tomatoes, she would be fine. It’s all part of the job. Before each public appearance she rehearses the insults likely to be hurled at her, so now even the N-word doesn’t make her flinch. It would be a violation of her professional code to ever say that she was offended or respond heatedly to the most hostile question. The noise of rancor and hate is preferable to the cut of chilly silence and indifference. To her credit, she has never called anyone a racist as an act of self-defense. She knows these are fighting words, and the meekest will go full commando at the merest hint of the charge, so she takes another approach. It is worth it if she can be of service.

The crowd loves this too — her ability to brave the slurs and assaults, yet not fold under pressure. On one or two occasions it backfires and stokes their cruelty, and she narrowly escapes when delight yields to wrath or the need to humiliate, when the hunger for violence overrides the safe word — democracy. Most of the time, they applaud her reasonableness, slap her on the back for being a good sport, commend her for not making a big deal of an innocuous exchange, not getting bent out of shape about a poor choice of words or hysterical about the misspelling of niggardly in an email from the chair, when clearly, he meant to indict the ungenerous administration, not direct a racial aspersion at junior colleagues and recently hired adjuncts. Lessons she learned from her private life prove useful in the political arena. She never makes anyone feel bad. Her language is neutral. She restricts herself to some of us and we, letting the audience decide the crude taxonomies of difference, the immutable badges and marks, the heritable indicators of privilege and disadvantage. For a moment, they pretend to almost forget that she isn’t one of them. The audience leaves brimming and placated.

Crow Jane delights in the invitation to the table. If you don’t have a seat at the table, she quips, then you’re the lunch. Her responsibilities have been clearly outlined. In her presence, people have the same conversation they have had for the last century, but now that she is at the table, it appears as if everything has changed. She bridges the gulf between those of us who are inviolable and sovereign and the some of us who are disposable, fixed on the losing side of the divide between life and not-life. Addressing this assembly of the powerful, the donors, trustees, collectors, board of directors, she is sassy and revanchist, perfectly delivering what they like, getting them off so easily in conversation — service by the hour or the term. She appears devoted, like a martyr for America, like a Dixiecrat’s wet dream, like a woman eager to get paid, like she’s on the clock for the project, like declaration and allegiance are slave play, like we have all the time we need, like deliberate speed is sufficient, like she can change the world — one white mind at a time.

Crow Jane is no innocent. She is diplomat and trickster and has navigated treacherous waters. No one group has a monopoly on truth has rescued her from many difficult situations. After a year in her first job as the highest-ranking and most visible diversity officer in the history of the corporation (a real estate company with a university attached), she had an epiphany. A lengthy search process with McKinsey failed to yield one viable candidate despite the handsome fee. The truth struck her like a brick to the head. A solution to the problem was not desired. She was one of a skilled set of personnel required to quiet the volatility of campus life, avoid the embarrassing spectacle of students dragging mattresses across the stage at graduation or placards demanding divestment on alumni weekend. A brilliant young program officer who entered the race-and-racism industry with her had been fired after devising a plan for the return of all the value extracted from the corporation’s stolen land and labor. She couldn’t find another position; diversity and inclusion had canceled her. Rumors were rampant. Some said she was now a trader on Wall Street, others that she was a minister at a megachurch in Atlanta preaching prosperity consciousness to her struggling flock.

At the Aspen Institute, Crow Jane explains structural inequality to the millionaires. The billionaires opt out; they don’t do woke. At the cocktail hour, they seek her out. Sorry I missed your lecture, but if it isn’t an imposition, can you teach me to do the stanky leg? Outfitted in the string of pearls and Hermès scarf from her gift bag, she begins the step-by-step instructions: bend the leg and pop the knee. After her second or third glass of Château Lafite Rothschild (2019), she twerks, imitating a respected prison abolitionist. The white boys are hysterical with laughter. They beg for another impersonation. Do Topsy this time.

The lecture circuit is her bread and butter. Crow Jane takes to the podium like a fish to water, like a devoted servant to the back stairs of the great house. She is no Red Peter compelled to account for his appearance before the Academy, offering a personal history of captivity and cruelty, negotiating the chasm between himself and Man. Her speech is devoted to policing the crisis and averting imminent dangers. Impaired citizenship and precarious life are no obstacle to faith in the Founding Fathers, a steadfast belief unshaken by the murder of her sister and the sentencing of her brother; true conviction is unwavering, unperturbed by circumstance. No apostate on her deathbed. No agree ’em to death and destruction for Crow Jane. She will continue to hold on for the last benediction.

When they go low, she gets down.

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She is a believer in the exceptional promise. The burning streets and mass shootings and state-sanctioned murders instill no doubt. She never loses heart and assures us — the some of us slain in the streets and murdered in our homes — that we won’t have to tarry forever. We are the explicit audience of her address, but beneath the demand that we do better and try harder is the hidden polemic, the chastisement: Avoid outside agitators and get your shit together because the powerful are indifferent to your complaints, your protests and slogans are unheeded. She might as well say cast down your buckets as she advises tolerance and fortitude, which are gold, which are better than money in the bank, which are essential to the task of creating a more perfect union. In the 21st century, there is no us and them. She utters the word responsibility eleven times and closes with an out-of-context quote from “Of the Faith of the Fathers.” Wait — just long enough to get this octogenarian into office; long enough to count the ballots; long enough to quell the riots; long enough to hide the video from the body camera; long enough to extract more from the bottom; long enough to lure the nationalists and patriots, the moms for liberty and the Karens, the gun lovers and the swing voters; long enough to quiet the abolitionists and round up the Marxists; long enough to make peaceful protest a felony; long enough to win the center right; long enough to quash all talk of antifascism, anti-Blackness, and Palestine; long enough to burn and ban books; long enough to subsidize the markets, engorge the rich, and canonize the venture capitalists; long enough for data points to cultivate desire, produce and direct thought; long enough for AI to make scholars and writers superfluous; long enough to exploit want, to exalt and intensify the illusory autonomy of the consumer’s I and mine; long enough to make our cities safer; long enough to reform the police and enlarge their budgets; long enough to maim and eradicate the wretched, to watch the spectacle of our death with an orgy of tears, with sentimental hard-ons. Crow Jane condemns the looters and the rioters, the free issue, los sin papeles, the undocumented, the refugees, the arsonists burning the big-box retailers, the vandals defacing the proclamations and monuments, the revelers heaving Colston into Bristol Harbor. They clearly don’t love liberty. When they chant, Reject the manumission papers, dismantle the state, free the land, she advises the governor to call in the National Guard.

The intended audience cheers, the town hall rings with applause and shouts of approval, high fives and awkward fist bumps. The ones clapping and heaping on praise, the members of the assembled body, the convention, the faculty senate, the true objects of her address don’t ask what is it? when she is within earshot. They bite their lower lips so as not to laugh at the ungainly sight of her in the flesh-colored suit, the body bag so unkind to the darker races. They don’t look askance at her large rough hands, thick wrists, and broad shoulders, or joke that there is nothing petite or diminutive about her, no porcelain doll or alluring frailty, wouldn’t want to drown in that hole, they chuckle and wink behind her back, man-to-man they concede to wanting to do her brother too, discourse on the incitement of pendulous breasts. Steatopygia or no, blond wig or no, like Jefferson they disavow the want of the very thing loathed; orangutans prevaricate in Notes on the State of Virginia, making even the deceiver George W. seem less so; the rapturous dalliances are legend; the predator Presidents, great statesmen, Founding Fathers, rapists, despoilers, and rakes lie like hell in the State of the Union; the senators from the heart of the Confederacy deny the monstrous intimacies of Strom Thurmond, the threnodies for dead slave girls recited with friends at the planters’ club, swear on their mothers’ graves and the pedestal of Aryan womanhood to be loyal to the cause in the anti-miscegenation filibuster.

When they go low, she gets down, making even Uncle Tom’s apotheosis seem half-hearted, sluggish. Crow Jane smiles, despite the black eye, the swollen lips, the blood filling her mouth, as she endeavors to subdue her public; yes, boys will be boys. She gives it her best effort, trying to disarm her handlers, escape the battle royal with all her teeth and minimal bruises; exchange pleasantries with her colleagues, her allies, her neighbors; as if a bright smile or choked laughter might provide a solvent against hate, goad loathing into affection, turn negation into recognition, make analogy of antagonism. How might she rearrange their desire? Or change their mind about some of us and let just a few escape their heel? Quell their doubts by touting our accomplishments and how little of it would have been possible without the little lady who started the war, the army of teachers, the philanthropists, and the Society to Protect and Care for the Darker Races? She rewrites the history of slavery as a story of interracial cooperation and friendship, insisting the slave has no heir, and Black radicalism no future.

This abject groveling doesn’t shield her from enmity or the blunt force of contempt and derision. A pit of doubt opens in her solar plexus. Has she been wrong about everything? In a moment of panic before the sea of Anglo-Saxon faces, she wants to retract everything. A voice in her head pleads, get me out of this now. But how? She could bolt from the podium, but there is nowhere to run and hide; she wouldn’t get far before her hosts blocked the path and asked, what the hell are you doing? They didn’t pay her for this nonsense. She counts to ten, catches her breath, composes herself, and proceeds. She is exhausted before she opens her mouth, humbled with gratitude, flushed with shame. Incorporated by the structure, puffed up with the little power they have deigned to give or concede, she laughs at herself, as she ventriloquizes the language of state and empire. She laughs exquisitely. She goes for the language of the mountaintop when they reach for the tiki torches. She reiterates the pledge: I am not trying to reconstruct anything.

When Crow Jane explains the scheme, the plan for our obliteration sounds like a promise to do right by us, like a proclamation of eventually, in due time, except as punishment for crime. She has been listening to them for so long that she thinks as they do, rationalizing death, evenly apportioning blame, imploring us to do better, berating the slags, the unhoused, and the impoverished for not carrying our weight, explaining away each tragedy until the last of us disappears. A quiet extinction, like bees and whales and insects and polar bears. A slow death. It is a tragedy, Crow Jane concedes, but we can’t save everyone. We too are culpable. Aren’t we the agent and executioner? Why love a hood rat, why hook up with a drug dealer? We are at fault, she contends, because of whom we love and how we live. Guilty because the decent embrace the criminal. The parallel societies must be extirpated. Crow Jane cautions us to be reasonable, pleads with us not to rush out, not to burn, loot, and destroy, not to terrorize others with our scarves and slogans. She cries on the jumbotron and asks us to weigh it carefully — the legal facts of the new regime versus our threadbare narrative. To make the choice — the state or our sister, civilization or barbarism? When Crow Jane concludes her chronicle, we are attentive but silent, unsure whether to laugh or hiss.