Protest sign calling for reparations for the Tulsa Riot, ca. 2000. National Museum of African American History and Culture.
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"The Least You Could Do"—"Black people all across the US are receiving the world's weirdest form of reparations: Venmo payments from white people."
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An incredible reading/resource list: Bilphena Yahwon's The Womanist Reader.
“I needed to find something that would make sense of the grief and despair that was not just choking me, but so many other Black women.”
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Sascha Bonét writes for The Paris Review on collage as "a historical practice of Black imagination":
It has helped us to envision unfathomable futures in the face of violence and uncertainty. It has been a creative way to love each other even though we haven’t been shown care, to express the depths of our experiences even when no one ever asked how we felt, to give evidence to all the things unseen.
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The Wide-Awakes: 'They deliberately targeted young people, calling massive crowds of youths to ‘wake up'... their iconography of an open eye, talk of throwing off past stupor.”
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"[O]ne motivating factor that I am not proud of but that I have recognized as relevant—in my personal circle, a larger number of white people are speaking up, and unconsciously I think that makes it feel safer and more important to care," one person wrote. "I recognize that this is ... highly problematic ... [b]ut I wouldn't be telling the truth if I didn't recognize this as a layer of this moment for me."
An answer Gene Demby received when he asked Code Switch's new white followers: why now?
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Refusing to collude in injustice is, I’ve found, easier said than done. Collusion is written onto our way of life, and nearly every interaction among white people is an invitation to collusion.
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The only way to avoid rot is to be proactive: check every apple, every tree. At the first sight of something amiss—a bruise or broken skin, a sunken place—toss that apple out, but don’t stop there. Scrub all the others and monitor them closely, but know that it’s likely already too late. Better to trim and burn the infected branch, or even the whole tree
Helen Rosner, "How Apples Go Bad." The New Yorker, 6/6/2020.
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The work of the people is what endures. It’s unromantic work, done in small increments, sometimes just as a blueprint for whatever future movements might arise, and it’s more precious than any bronzed monument or seal or city name. The work of the students who will not rest until the cops leave their schools. Of the medics who guide people under the shade of a tree and flush the tear gas out of their eyes. Of the people who sew masks, or make bags of supplies and bike them across the city through police barricades. Of the people who carry bags of ice so that the water stays cold. Of the Black people who sacrifice their own safety to keep their people safe. Of the people who show up to courthouses, and in front of police stations, and in the suburbs. Of the mothers who grieve their dead children and who, despite their grief, continue to fight for the living. The new monuments the people are building toward cannot yet be seen. And still, here we are, leaping forward.
Hanif Abdurraqib, "The Vanishing Monuments of Columbus, Ohio." The New Yorker, 6/24/2020.
