Racism

James Baldwin wrote, “It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less.

Dominant narratives are keeping us hostage. By freeing up our imagination to what is impossible, we can break ourselves free as well. Just as much as we should not colonize the possible future, we should not colonize the so-called impossible future either.

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

WHITE PEOPLE HAVE their own dueling consciousness, between the segregationist and the assimilationist: the slave trader and the missionary, the proslavery exploiter and the antislavery civilizer, the eugenicist and the melting pot–ter, the mass incarcerator and the mass developer, the Blue Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter, the not-racist

Someone reproducing inequity through permanently assisting an overrepresented racial group into wealth and power is entirely different than someone challenging that inequity by temporarily assisting an underrepresented racial group into relative wealth and power until equity is reached.

In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

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