John Brown's raid struck a nerve on the eve of the Civil War because it evoked the white South's deepest fear: that having been the masters they would become the slaves, and that the cruelties they had visited on their "property" would be visited upon them in their turn. This has been the deepest fear of "white" America since both before and after the Civil War, and it explains a great deal about the violence of American policy domestic and foreign. It is reflected to this day in the virulent racism of the white underclass that flocks to the banner of Donald Trump.

To keep our privileged position in the world, we must suppress those of whom we have taken advantage, generally defined as "non-white": whether African American, Asian, African, or Arab. We live with the comment misattributed to George Orwell that "We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm us." And in doing so, we project our own violence onto them. If we live in fear of Muslim Arab terror, it is nothing to the hundredfold terror we have visited upon the Muslims and the Arabs. A friend of mine likes to say that people in the Middle East have no respect for human life, and yet the minimum count of the civilians murdered in the Iraq War is 120,000. It shows itself in the internment of Japanese Americans and the ruthlessness and racism of the War in the Pacific. It is manifested in the winning of the West and the ethic cleansing of the Native American. Of course, the phenomenon is not limited to America, witness the German genocide of the Jews. This insight, although expressed in slightly different terms, lies at the heart of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

The fragility of the "black body" permeates Coates' work; he posits that African Americans have a unique appreciation of the violence that is visited upon them, whether by Baltimore gangs or the Prince George's County's police. This is the violence that preserves untroubled white America's dream of peaceful suburbs and two cars in the garage, built on the suffering of the people it excludes. It is reflected in our gated communities, the fear of my neighbours in suburban Detroit even to enter the city, inhabited by alien beings quite forthrightly described as n*s. It is reflected in our reflexive attribution of criminality to African Americans, the readiness of the police to shoot and the ease with which we excuse the shootings. It is reflected in our segregated neighbourhoods and our segregated schools. Coates talks about how from the days of his childhood to his present life in New York as a well-known writer, a third of his brain has always been devoted to self-preservation, whether in be fear of violence in the 'hood or fear of arrest in upscale New York.

Abraham Lincoln famously said, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master." Like it or not, the ruthless pace of demographics is eroding the privileged position of "white America," no longer a majority in "their country." There will not be peace at home or abroad until people who consider themselves white are willing to renounce their Dream of supremacy and the violence that attends it. And yet the reality is that white America simply lives in denial of the fragility of their own bodies, a denial that is enabled by the violence out of sight at the margins of their society, for our houses are built on sand, and we can only hope that the violence we have meted out to others will not be repaid upon us. We are not ready for Lincoln's prophecy that the war shall continue "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword." It has not been paid yet.