NO EASY STORIES
 

"The story that racism belongs to poor people in the South is a little too easy, though. Just as not everybody up here, geographically and economically, is on the right side of the line, so not everyone down there is on the wrong side. But the story allows middle-class people to hate poor people while claiming to be on the side of truth, justice, and everything else good. 

"So, on the one hand, we have white people who hate black people. On the other hand, we have white people who hate other white people on the grounds that they hate black people. But that latter hatred accuses many wrongfully, and it serves as a convenient cover-up for the racism that is all around us. The reason it matters is that middle-class people despising poor people becomes your basic class war, and the ongoing insults seem to have been at least part of what has weakened the environmental movement in particular and progressive politics in general." 

— Rebecca Solnit, "One Nation Under Elvis" 

CURRENT MOOD

"The interpreter is a receptacle: constantly filling and constantly emptying. An empty signifier. A body that takes in other bodies, temporarily holding them before releasing them via language, thus making them accessible to other people’s awareness, if not understanding.

The role of mediator, receptacle, body-holding body is one that has been historically gendered “female,” and in practice a majority of working interpreters (and translators) are women. Our demand that interpreters be understood as instigators is feminist at its core. These “parrots” talk back; these secretaries write manifestos."

— Antena Language Justice Collaborative, "A Manifesto for Interpretation as Instigation" 

MUNICIPAL PLUNDER

"If policing in New York under Giuliani and Bloomberg was crime prevention tainted by racist presumptions, in other areas of the country ostensible crime prevention has mutated into little more than open pillage. When the Justice Department investigated the Ferguson police department in the wake of Michael Brown’s death, it found a police force that disproportionately ticketed and arrested blacks and viewed them “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.” This was not because the police department was uniquely evil—it was because Ferguson was looking to make money. “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,” the report concluded. These findings had been augured by the reporting of The Washington Post , which had found a few months earlier that some small, cash-strapped municipalities in the St. Louis suburbs were deriving 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from various fines for traffic violations, loud music, uncut grass, and wearing “saggy pants,” among other infractions. This was not public safety driving policy—it was law enforcement tasked with the job of municipal plunder.

"The argument that high crime is the predictable result of a series of oppressive racist policies does not render the victims of those policies bulletproof. Likewise, noting that fear of crime is well grounded does not make that fear a solid foundation for public policy.

"Deindustrialization had presented an employment problem for America’s poor and working class of all races. Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks. Mass incarceration “widened the income gap between white and black Americans,” writes Heather Ann Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan, “because the infrastructure of the carceral state was located disproportionately in all-white rural communities.”"

                          —  Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Never Marry Again in Slavery: The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration" 

UNSOUND PRIVILEGE

"Everyone talks about green cities now, but the concrete results in the affluent cities mostly involve curbside composting and tacking solar panels onto rooftops while residents continue to drive, to shop, to eat organic pears flown in from Argentina, to be part of the big machine of consumption and climate change. The free-range chickens and Priuses are great, but they alone aren't the adequate tools for creating a truly different society and ecology. The future, at least the sustainable one, the one in which we will survive, isn't going to be invented by people who are happily surrendering selective bits and pieces of environmentally unsound privilege. It's going to be made by those who had all that taken from them or never had it in the first place." 

— Rebbeca Solnit, "Detroit Arcadia"

IT'S PASSED THROUGH BLOOD

"The worst of white folks, I understood, wasn’t some gang of rabid white people in crisp pillowcases and shaved heads. The worst of white folks was a pathetic, powerful “it.” It conveniently forgot that it came to this country on a boat, then reacted violently when anything or anyone suggested it share. The worst of white folks wanted our mamas and grandmas to work themselves sick for a tiny sliver of an American pie it needed to believe it had made from scratch. IT was all at once crazy-making and quick to discipline us for acting crazy. It has an insatiable appetite for virtuoso black performance and routine black suffering. The worst of white folks really believed that the heights of black and brown aspiration should be emulation of itself. White Americans were wholly responsible for the worst of white folks, though they would make sure it never wholly defined them.

I didn’t know a lot as a seventh-grader in Mississippi, and I had far fewer words to describe what I actually knew, but the worst of white folks I knew far too well...It passed through blood."

— Kiese Laymon, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

EXCESS

"It is not unusual for us to feel that life is too much for us. And it is not unusual to feel that we really should be up to it; that there may be too much to cope with — too many demands — but that we should have the wherewithal to deal with it. Faced with the stresses and strains of everyday life it is easy now for people to feel that they are failing; and what they are failing at, one way or another, is managing the ordinary excesses that we are all beset by: too much frustration, too much bad feeling, too little love, too little success, and so on. One of the things people most frequently say in psychoanalysis is, ‘Perhaps I am overreacting, but . . .’; and one of the commonest complaints today is about feeling too much or feeling too little. I want to suggest that we are simply too much for ourselves, but that this too-muchness is telling us something important… My proposition is that it is impossible to overreact. That when we call our reactions overreactions what we mean is just that they are stronger than we would like them to be. In other words, we sometimes call ourselves and other people excessive as a way of invalidating or tempering the truths we tell ourselves or that other people tell us. It is impossible to overreact."

...

"Perhaps “excess” is a word we use to reassure ourselves that we can be something other than excessive. If we start off by being, at least some of the time, too much for other people, and become, in adolescence, definitively too much for other people, so much so that we have to leave them, and then become adults who are unavoidably too much for ourselves, what is to be done? Well, one thing that can be done is to find someone we are not too much for…"

— Adam Phillips, On Balance

THE WHISPER OF WINGS

"That the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil can shape the weather in Texas is a summation of chaos theory that is now an oft-repeated cliché. But there are billions of butterflies on earth, all flapping their wings. Why does one gesture matter more than another? Why this Facebook post, this girl with a drum?

Even to try to answer this you'd have to say that the butterfly is borne aloft by a particular breeze that was shaped by the flap of the wing of, say, a sparrow; and so behind causes are causes, behind small agents are other small agents, inspirations, and role models, as well as outrages to react against. The point is not that causation is unpredictable and erratic. The point is that butterflies and sparrows and young women in veils and an unknown twenty-year-old rapping Arabic and you yourself, if you wanted it, sometimes have tremendous power, enough to bring down a dictator, enough to change the world."

— Rebecca Solnit, "The Butterfly and the Boiling Point" 

WHAT IT IS NOT 

as a black woman.
a woman of color. 
writer. 
artist.
creative.
my work is not a literary zoo. 
for you to come observe. learn. about the animals. 
or
a space to come and dissolve into a plastic empathy.
or a space to publicly, loudly, dominantly flog your privileges.

nor is it
a warm indiscriminate. cavernous. lap to lay in. 
it is a boundary. 
i am a boundary. 

— unmammy 

— Nayyirah Waheed, Salt

ON KILLING THE DREAM: 

"I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planter, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos." 

— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

HOW TO LISTEN: 

"Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard— it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see: an old woman’s gonorrhea is connected to her guilt is connected to her marriage is connected to her children is connected to the days when she was a child. All this is connected to her domestically stifled mother, in turn, and to her parents’ unbroken marriage; maybe everything traces its roots to her very first period, how it shamed and thrilled her.

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes a seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response."

— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

AUTONOMY

"Men in Western cultures began redefining themselves and their relationship to the world in an effort to free themselves from the Divine Right of kings, oppressive myths, and religions. They would be separate, autonomous indiviudals, guided by reason alone...Because males set the standard, maturity in the New World became equated with autonomy and independence." 

All social relationships are distorted when it is believed that maturity requires cutting ties to others, when the assertion of self is thought to be at the expense of others (Hirsch 1989). A woman who holds the view that one advances at the expense of others will feel forced to choose between herself and others (Gilligan, 1982/1983). She can either assert herself and cause harm to others or she can stand in the background curtailing her own development so her children and husband might prosper. In contrast, those like Harriet Jacobs who assume they can advance themselves while lifting up others have a way of thinking that can empower everyone in the relationship (Debold, Wilson, and Malave, 1993)." 

— Mary Belenky, et al, A Tradition That Has No Name