White fear under slavery springs from guilty habits anticipating divine retribution

Evidence

For Jefferson, white fear takes root here: in the habits formed as we live lives shaped by the ideas and practices of white supremacy and in the anticipation of the possible consequences that may follow from what we are doing to other people. Those habits carry with them, then, a kind of fear and trembling that someday, at some point, all of us, like sinners condemned to hell, will be held to account. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 233

Categorization

• XREF: This architectural link between racial habits and fear foreshadows Glaude’s main thesis that the value gap rests on a structure of avoidance and dread, which connects to my reading goal of tracing how ‘racial habits’ are defined.