Racism

what I call minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and

Decolonizing is training our gaze on the origins of suffering in order to uproot them. It is the ambition to build a community of respect for the “animacy of life itself.”70

This panic motivates our cruelty, this fear of the dark makes it impossible that our lives shall be other than superficial;

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.”

creator of the Smithsonian Museum’s “Programs in Black Culture,” and one of the leading authorities on Black American music culture,

Elvis’s life before fame featured repeated experiences with humiliation, but he also experienced something else characteristic of the South and the United States in general: the wages of Whiteness. An effort to place Elvis more accurately in history doesn’t just require a recognition that he saw his indebtedness to Black musicians. It also means

In the black neighborhoods, he learned that developing one’s own sound was essential and that sound and feeling were paramount over technique.