On this day of honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., I have been thinking about denial. Historical denial—like the way even major slave revolts such as the 1811 German Coast uprising still receive little attention—as well as the many different varieties of personal denial, those extenuations and deflections which ward off a full self-accounting, a wholesale review of where we really stand—and with whom. I’ve been thinking about this in part because I’ve been watching The Good Place, which in many ways is a show about shedding the layers of denial that we accumulate during a life, but also (and more Read more