“A half century before the poet Claudia Rankine used her MacArthur ‘genius’ grant to establish an institute partly dedicated to the study of whiteness, [William Melvin] Kelley turned his considerable intellect and imagination to the question of what it is like to be white in this country, and what it is like, for all Americans, to live under the conditions of white supremacy – not just the dramatic cross-burning, neo-Nazi manifestations of it common to his time and our own but also the everyday forms endemic to our national culture.”