Racism
Ongoing discussion…
Racism
say? I was once reading an interview with James Baldwin, and he described a frustration he had with Langston Hughes. He said when Hughes told you about a lynching, it was too realistic. That Hughes sounded like his daddy. Baldwin preferred Countee Cullen. He wanted the art, the suggestiveness, the distance to make it possible to digest horror.
Imani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic.
Ibram X. Kendi • How to Be an Antiracist
At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans—lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession—either to come to terms
... See moreJames Baldwin • Notes of a Native Son
Contemplative space is hard to define. Contemplation is generally not a practice that offers immediate jolts of anything. There’s (well, usually) no chatty/ethery response from on high, no neatly cleared path unfurling after a good long think. In fact, more often it feels like “nothing” at all is happening in that open space. The “soft”... See more
Lia Purpura Published • The Ecology of Attention
Ta-Nehisi Coates: “The defining feature of being drafted into the Black race [is] the inescapable robbery of time.”
Jenny Odell • Saving Time
When we speak of the ills of the world—violence, poverty, injustice—we are not speaking conceptually; we are talking about things that happen to bodies.
Sonya Renee Taylor • The Body Is Not an Apology
The first thing to understand is that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves. In some city
... See moreJane Jacobs • The Death and Life of Great American Cities
That common good is a set of shared commitments. To the rule of law. To democracy. To tolerance of our differences. To equal political rights and equal opportunity. To participating in our civic life. To sacrificing for the ideals we hold in common. To upholding the truth.
We cannot have a functioning society without... See more