We learn in school that the civil rights movement was about overcoming segregation. But as my father has pointed out to me, what an oddly neutral word - segregation to describe what was happening in this country. We prefer it to more blunt descriptions of that social arrangement: subjugation, oppression. And perhaps, also, we don't want to acknowledge the ways in which we were not segregated at all, the ways in which the lives of black and white people have always been intertwined at the most intimate level. Slavery was intimate. Oppression is so often an act of intimacy.