Renowned writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman writes a new piece of speculative fiction as a starting point for a gripping reflection on white supremacy. "The paradox is that human extinction provides the answer and the corrective to the modern project of whiteness, which Du Bois defines as the ownership of the earth forever and ever, the possessive claim of the universe itself. The stranglehold of white supremacy appears so unconquerable, so eternal that its only certain defeat is the end of the world, the death of Man. Neither war nor rights have succeeded in remaking the slave into the human or in eradicating racism. In the wake of the disaster, the messenger, the last black man on earth, will be permitted to live as a human for the first time. “I am alive, I am alive,” he could shout in the streets of Manhattan, without fear of punishment or reprisal. He is alive because the world is dead." "In the destroyed world, he experiences a state of freedom that he has never before enjoyed. In the ruins of the metropolis, he is able to enter a fine restaurant that would have refused him or any other Negro service. It wouldn’t serve him yesterday, but the breach between the old world and the now affords new opportunities. For the first time, he moves about the city without anticipating violence or insult. There are no white citizens or police to regulate or arrest his movement. There is no Other to withhold or confer recognition, although it is hard to shake the feeling that someone is watching him. After an exhausting search in lower Manhattan, he fails to discover any other survivors. It is a mass extinction: everywhere stood, leaned, lounged, and lay the dead, in grim and awful silence."