Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
The fact is, “exceptional Negroes” have always been a staple of an apartheid-like educational system that separates the “gifted” from the “normal,” and both from the “naughty” or “underachieving.” Sticks and stones will only break my bones, but words can lift or crush me.
Ruha Benjamin • Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)
On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales
and a semi-insane African grey parrot for a pet who uttered Swine at intervals, and who otherwise spoke only in profanities.
Jean McNeil • The Dhow House



how Blackness is selectively celebrated (and contained) within the white imagination.
Ruha Benjamin • Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)
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.
Ruha Benjamin • Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)
He looked at the human beings he had chained up and noted that they seemed to be the type of people who wore chains. So unlike other people. Frighteningly unlike! Later, in his cotton fields, he had them whipped and then made them go back to work and thought, They can’t possibly feel as we do. You can whip them and they go back to work. And having
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