Black lives occupy the gap between American ideals and practice

Evidence

We wrestle, like Jacob, with the lived contradiction—not between beliefs and practices, but between and within beliefs themselves. Black folk never aspired to be the moral conscience of the nation, even as black leaders shouted it from the rooftops. It only happened to be the case that our actual lives rested in the gap between who America said it was as a democracy and how we actually lived. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 26

Categorization

• DEFINE: Value gap = contradiction between and within beliefs themselves, not between belief and practice — a precise conceptual refinement.