Obama’s condemnation of “original sin” begets the white Christian nation’s perpetual forgiveness and redemption, but also anticipates the pessimism of those who would rightfully allege that white supremacy’s visceral structures of dominance are endemic to American national reproduction. This attempts to erase the indelible: the social and economic system that rests on the subjection of Africans as racial chattel is not a compartmentalized or reconcilable event in the American white racial destiny, but is the foundation of what legal scholar Cheryl Harris has called the ongoing legal consolidation of whiteness as property, a consolidation that can only occur at the expense of those who are dispossessed and/or actually owned by the white nation.
