Racism

The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.

To be antiracist is to never mistake the global march of White racism for the global march of White people. To be antiracist is to never mistake the antiracist hate of White racism for the racist hate of White people. To be antiracist is to never conflate racist people with White people, knowing there are antiracist Whites and racist non-Whites. To

The art form that black Americans have relied upon for generations is no longer theirs.

The advocates and defenders of the black jazz avant-garde and the emergent black cultural nationalists had to distance themselves from what they took to be the threat to their project of black freedom—bebop as jazz authenticity, and cultural assimilation as the solution to black cultural subordination.

DC is being gentrified like major cities everywhere. It raises the question: To whom does this place belong? That is a local question, but it is also an existential one. We are literally still fighting over whether Black people belong to their home places and whether their home places belong to them. Once, the formerly enslaved migrated to DC with

do not seek to explain or resolve the question of this exclusion in terms of assimilation, inclusion, or civil or human rights, but rather depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity. I name this paradox the wake, and I use

Yes, my steps are a little slower now … but my spirit is energized. I still have joy. I am full of hope for the future. We will get there. We will get there—together. We will get there—as one.

In our culture we hear a lot about guilt but not enough about the politics of shame. As long as we feel shame, we can never believe ourselves worthy of love.