May 7, 2021
Black struggle struck the match.
We might move on from complaining about how educating white people is exhausting to just treating them like shit.
American Accomplice
The Speculator
Six hundred and ten square feet of possibility
My home was a commodity with a life of its own. It operated within DC’s cycle of displacement, increasing in value without much input from me, and regardless of my politics or morals. My income, which in my third year at HUD would approach six figures, made me an economic gentrifier. It had allowed me to pay an absurd amount for 610 square feet.
February 22, 2021
BLM in the Billionaire Wilderness
A channel for movement at the grindingly slow pace of government
Our new group joined around a hundred people who stood on the grass and the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. A counter-protest formed on the sidewalk across the street—they numbered around ten, all men, all white, some with assault rifles strapped across their chests. Together they held one sign, a large piece of cardboard with Sharpie letters that read ALL LIVES MATTER FCK SOROS AND ANTEFA [sic]. It was mostly silent—a modern-day Western standoff, with two opposing factions staring each other down and a man in a MAGA hat on horseback circling both groups.
January 29, 2021
From the Lockdown Protests to the Capitol
January 6 and the enduring lessons of Black Lives Matter
We cannot police our way out of authoritarianism. An increasingly authoritarian police state in the hands of the “right” bourgeois elites will not suppress the far right; it will instead train a new generation of far-right foot soldiers and target, disorganize, and destroy fascism’s most dogged opponents among the far left.
Fire in the Hold
On Afropessimism
Inasmuch as the end of the world already feels imminent — we are, after all, staring down mass racial injustice, environmental catastrophe, and a global pandemic — vague gestures toward a radical restructuring of society without even a basic blueprint feel, if not incomplete, indicative of a failure of imagination.
Why do the fictions of one of our most important writers involve so much indirection?
Architecture Again
Yell: A Documentary of My Time Here
WHITE PEOPLE SAY THE WORD PEDAGOGY TO ME
How I hate that I ignore more calls from my mother than I answer. How I can’t leave !!!!!!!!!!! even though I feel unfulfilled in my second week. How that would be its own sort of tragedy for my mother, because at least for the next three years when I ignore her calls she knows where I am. How I want to KMS but I’m too much of a narcissist to go through with it. I’m too afraid of what my mama would do if I did. So I’ll just do it here. On the page and see if I still feel the same afterwards.
August 19, 2020
Do we want a world in which people who cause harm are tortured and warehoused in cages?
Prisons Into Hospices
June 26, 2020
Out Here
An interview with photographer Nicole Buchanan
Every way we’re photographing Black men, and women, and children, whoever, needs to be humanizing. Photography has always dehumanized African and other African-descendent people. Early photographers documented slaves, so if they ran away, you’d have a photograph to know what your slave looked like. That’s the history, and as photographers now we have a duty to show Black life in a positive light. If we take that humanity away, we’re back at the beginning.
June 25, 2020
Community Defense in Minneapolis
We are not yet after a revolution
Abolition—the notion that prisons and policing are directly linked to slavery and thus antithetical to human liberation—is not new, but it is to some people. That is lamentable, and not unrelated to the challenges associated with social transformation, but it is not avoidable. We need to prepare the ground, look for nascent and emerging practices and nourish them.
June 23, 2020
Such Things Have Done Harm
The only people I ever hear saying the world needs stories are the people involved in telling them
We should be willing to demand more than fellow feeling. The New York City Council crowed about its progressivism in passing a billion-dollar reduction in the NYPD’s budget. That number would just about return the department budget to the levels it was under Mayor Bloomberg’s administration. It is indicative of a dangerous lack of imagination if the best we can do is make a tacit admission that it was unwise to give the police more resources in the years after the rise of Black Lives Matter.
