Today’s Black Americans are living in “the wake” of centuries of slavery, said Dr Corey Miles, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Morgan State University. Thus, contemporary Black activists are doing “wake work.” Dr Miles said the South, as the center of US slavery, presents special problems, but the whole country is hostile to Black lives. “We are trying to see how we can forge emotional belonging to a space that surveils and polices us,” he said.