by Zoe Pollock
Cord Jefferson has some, with "'Nigger Day' In a Country Town," originally published in the New York Times on November 30, 1874:
If America's relationship with its black population is a plane crashJames Baldwin theorized in a 1966 essay that "the Negro-in-America is increasingly the central problem in American life""Nigger Day" should be considered a sort of black box, a reminder of how calculated and insidious the variety of attention paid to American blacks was, even as this post-slavery segregation was about to be codified into the Jim Crow laws that would blanket the South.
I love this article for many reasonsnot least because I love history!but primarily because, in a few simple, condescending paragraphs, it highlights pretty much every single problem that will burden American race relations 137 years into the future, as if the author were some snooty Nostradamus.