A powerful white man’s sexual approach revealed his blindness to black humanity

Evidence

It was frightening—not the gesture itself, but the abjectness of it, and the assumption of a swift and grim complicity: as my identity was defined by his power, so was my humanity to be placed at the service of his fantasies. If the lives of those children [black children who were attempting to integrate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas] were in those wet, despairing hands, if their future was to be read in those wet, blind eyes, there was reason to tremble. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 190

Categorization

• XREF: The assault scene crystallizes the ‘monstrous intimacies’ theme that runs through Baldwin’s late work and connects to the region-wide analysis in the next paragraphs.