odds and ends / 6.25.2020

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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Nikole Hannah-Jones on what is truly owed.

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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. 

 

Eula Biss,"White Debt." NYT 2015.

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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. 

'there are days in this country when you wonder what your role in this country is and your place in it.'

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The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of Black people in their midst. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, Black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of Black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights. 

Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of Black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project.

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Once again, Black Americans are leading the way, creating an opportunity for this deeply messed-up country to change and do better. Gratitude is too paltry a word to express my feelings for such persistence and courage in the face of such continuous, callous brutality.

What I am doing: Listening. Supporting Project Zero, joining the NAACP, donating to Black Lives Matter Cleveland and bail funds. Talking to my kid, talking to my friends, talking to my family. Moving forward, messily and imperfectly, in the work of trying to live an anti-racist life.

'we somehow want this to be easy and simple, and it never will be'

Nikole Hannah-Jones' was interviewed yesterday on Fresh Air.  She covers racial injustice for the NYT Magazine and her article, "Choosing a School for my Daughter in a Segregated City," is just an amazing piece of reporting and writing — a complex subject tackled with clarity and completeness and insight.

I listened to the broadcast in the car, then came home and listened to the whole thing again. There is no way to do the conversation justice with a pull quote (you can listen here, or read the full transcript), but here's an excerpt:

GROSS: OK, so this is a dilemma right here. If integration is a goal - to have more diversity and to have more fair schools - and here is something that's going to integrate a school not for the sake of integration but because of overcrowding - but still it would be more integration - and everybody has concerns, everybody's worried about the outcome, so what does that say about the predicament that parents and schools are in? 

HANNAH-JONES: What I always say is we somehow want this to be easy and simple, and it never will be. The systems that and the actions that created this inequality took a lot of effort and a lot of time. And we want to undo them, you know, with no pain for anyone with a snap of the fingers. On my Twitter account, I say - I cover race from 1619. And 1619 is the year the first Africans were brought to what would become America as - to be enslaved. I say that so that we understand there is a very - before we were even a country, we had created this system that was going to put black people on the bottom, and we created a caste system. 

And to undo that, we feel like no one has to give anything up or there's not going to be any tensions or it's going to be easy, and it simply won't. One of the things that I really try to do with my work is show how racial segregation and racial inequality was intentionally created with a ton of resources. From the federal government, to the state, to city governments, to private citizens, we put so much effort into creating the segregation and inequality, and we're willing to put almost no effort in fixing it. And that's the problem.

There is a lot of talk online about what it is to check or surrender privilege; seeing what it looks like in practice is useful (and humbling). This especially:

HANNAH-JONES: [M]y daughter is not going to get an education that she would get if I paid $40,000 a year in private school tuition, but that's kind of the whole point of public schools. I think she - I know she's learning a lot. I think it is making her a good citizen. I think it is teaching her that children who have less resources than her are not any less intelligent than her, not any less worthy than her. And I truly - and I say this - and it always feels weird when I say it as a parent because a lot of other parents look at you a little, you know, like you're maybe not as good of a parent - I don't think she's deserving of more than other kids. I just don't.

I think that we can't say this school is not good enough for my child and then sustain that system. I think that that's just morally wrong; if it's not good enough for my child then why are we putting any children in those schools?