Racism

Paradoxically, many of these disciplinary policies are akin to the progressive vision espoused by eugenicists like Karl Pearson, justifying harsh discipline as a means to “close academic disparities.” Schooling becomes standardized testing without creative expression, arbitrary rules without room to breathe, Black Excellence without Black Joy.

The relationship was further compounded by the fact that, historically, jazz musicians, regardless of skin color, had been seen primarily as entertainers, not artists.

There is one overmastering problem that the socially and politically disinherited always face: Under what terms is survival possible?

I was a dupe, a chump who saw the ongoing struggles of Black people on MLK Day 2000 and decided that Black people themselves were the problem. This is the consistent function of racist ideas—and of any kind of bigotry more broadly: to manipulate us into seeing people as the problem, instead of the policies that ensnare them.

Decolonizing reality consists of unlearning consensual “reality,” of seeing through reality’s roles and descriptions by what Don Juan calls acts of not-doing.

racist White people unleash on Black people

But ever and again, we look toward the east and discover that there is another light which shines even in the darkness, and “the spear of frustration” is transformed “into a shaft of light.”