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245anyone with melanin in their skin, anyone with ancestors from Senegal and Benin and Nigeria and Haiti and Cuba and Colombia and Mexico and Chad and Syria and Somalia and Iran.There is an American assumption underlying every bit of this terror: I see you, I know you, and you are nothing. I remember this when the pressure of living as an adult with my family and children in the South seems like too much, when the poverty my family and community has been mired in for generations by design is too galling, too present. There are moments that would break me if they could, moments when I am all too aware of how we have been robbed of opportunities to create intergenerational wealth, when our schools fail us, when we are shuttled into the service sector, when we scrabble for demeaning job after demeaning job. Days when I see one of my cousins, struggling with addiction and untreated mental illness, walking the streets shirtless and shoeless, drowning in his life, and my heart breaks. It is on days like this when a white person will interview me and ask me how to make black people want more for themselves, and I%u2019ve had enough.I want to run away, at moments like that, to someplace where there is no humidity, where the light is golden over the hills and the specter of all that we have survived and died by is not present in every flag, every street name, every monument, every vote. I fantasize about living in that fabled America. And then I remember that one cannot escape an infinite room. Moving across a few state lines is not going to help me escape this place that tells me I am less. The racist, misogynistic sentiment I encounter every day in Mississippi is the same belief that put in place the economic and social caste systems that allowed America to become America. It is the bedrock beneath the soil. Racial violence and subjugation happen on the streets of St. Louis, on the sidewalks of New York City and in the BART stations of Oakland.Sometimes the aggression is deeper, systemic. It is black children in my family enrolling in free preschool programs where their teachers barely tolerate them, ignore them, do a terrible job of leading them to learning. It is my nephew being accused of selling drugs in middle school and being strip-searched. It is black children getting into fights at school, principals pressing charges, and those same children being suspended and sent to juvenile detention centers. It is a white drunk driver hitting my brother from behind, killing him and never being held accountable for the crime of murdering him%u2013only for leaving the scene of an accident.Living in the American South for generations, my family has collected so many accounts of racial terror, passed down over the decades. I carry every slur, every slight, every violent malign within me; they have become a part of me, accreted in me year after year to settle in me and express themselves in my body: vascular inflammation, migraine headaches, diabetes, giving birth to both of my children prematurely.But if we suffer from a particularly Southern strain of this illness, know this is an American disease. I know it when I see Donald Trump bumper stickers on cars, paired as they are with Confederate flags and NRA logos. I know it when I see brown children being stolen from their parents, when I hear the openmouthed wail, the panicked screech, with no promise of reunion. I know it when Trump refuses to call white terrorists %u201cterrorists,%u201d when he insists that even though they march with torches, beat black men viciously at their rallies and kill a woman by driving into a crowd, that these are still %u201cfine%u201d people. Ascribes them both virtue and personhood, while denying the same to 10How does Ward%u2019s word choice in paragraph 10 contribute to her tone and strengthen the appeals she is making?115 Jesmyn WardCopyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.