I recommend all the essays/articles I post on our reading lists – but one that I have come back to a lot over the past couple of years is the one quoted on the third slide, written by Kemi Adeyemi, who happens to be a scholar based in Seattle, and is also the advisor for New Archives.
Stay safe and stay focused. Even if the visible protesting has slowed down, the work is always just beginning. <3
–satpreet
1. Dana Heng.
A black and white sedan made of painted cardboard has the word ‘COPS’ written across its side. Its windows are cracked and bright red and yellow cardboard flames shoot out of its roof and tail.2. Vivian Phillips.
“Generations of Black families have huddled around caskets, swallowing cakes and pies to sweeten the bitterness of violent, unexplained loss. Exchanging low hums and loud agonizing cries, they ask why? Information is usually slow arriving, much like after abolition, when slaves in Texas continued to labor for two years before being notified they were free.”3. Kemi Adeyemi.
“This scene in the performance reflects upon the multilingual and multisensorial ways that non-white people can interrogate and refuse the expectations of civil discourse that overdetermine their participation in society writ large. For us, the doing of politics is not staged through (or even possible within) the allegedly civil discourse characteristic of processual, bureaucratic, representational (and reparative) government that has long served Man and his rigid perpendicularity: the woman’s invisible antagonist will never truly perceive her complaint, let alone repair the wrongdoing, no matter what scales of urgency she performs. What emerges is instead a doing of politics that takes as its starting point the acutely leaning performatives of those for whom the very capacity for civility (and rationality and thus citizenry) has always been suspect.”4. Nagisa Oshima.
“It’s the nation that does not permit you to live.” / “I don’t accept that. What is a nation? Show me one. I don’t want to be killed by an abstraction.”5. Margaret Wilkerson Sexton.
“Black people are hearing from former colleagues and associates they never thought they’d speak to again. Any white progressive worth her salt is posting black squares or the latest instructive memes on privilege. Donations to bail funds are soaring, and yet most Black people I know are suspicious. How could they not be? It’s hard to know what sparked the sudden onset of concern. If it’s guilt, it won’t lead to sustained impact, just as it wouldn’t in my own relationship. In a few weeks, the concern will start to dwindle as will the support, and unfortunately, without the commitment of allies, the movement will falter. It is white people’s problem after all, racism. They’re the inventors of it, and they’re the carriers and the wielders. Its demise rests in their hands.”6. Saidiya Hartman.
“The undoing of the plot begins because she won’t do shit. She won’t be no bird in a cage, no black woman at the lectern, no model Negro, no cog in the machine.”
