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?
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?
June 26, 2020
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
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
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.
June 22, 2020
Reclaim the neighborhood, reclaim community, reclaim public safety
Every donation to a bail fund contributes to an alternative vision of justice by treating bail not as a neutral threshold an incarcerated person has to meet before they’re allowed to return to their community, but as an obstacle to justice that can only be resisted collectively. When a fund pays bail, it declares that pretrial detention is cruel and immoral, and that keeping someone locked up doesn’t automatically make their neighbors “safer.”
June 11, 2020
The officials who had endorsed reform would only cede the state’s unique power to kill, to ruin, under incredible pressure
On Friday, during the protest, it became apparent that the State House and the mall were looking out for each other, government and business close collaborators in urban fortification. The mall is one of a handful of grotesqueries visited upon the city’s historic downtown as part of mayor Buddy Cianci’s urban renaissance. It is most notable today for being America’s largest carpeted indoor shopping center, and—suddenly relevant—for the abundance of windows along its facade.
Melanin and accents are ineffective binding substances
No matter how far away you were from New York that day, no matter how distant your connection to that day was, no matter how much lower than zero the count of the people you lost on that day was, if you were white, 9/11 happened to you personally, with blunt and scalding force. Because the antithesis of an American is an immigrant and because we could not be victims in the public eye, we became suspects. And so September 11 changed the immigration landscape forever. Muslims and Sikhs became the targets of hate crimes. ICE was the creation of 9/11 paranoia.
June 9, 2020
The cops called us “bodies”
Each additional arrestee meant more strain on the NYPD’s capacity, another extended shift for an arresting officer, another public embarrassment. Lacking speed, strength, or tactical skill, and having nothing better to do for the moment than sit in a jail cell, I resolved to attend protests with the goal of protecting other people from the violence of the cops—and if that meant being arrested, so be it.
June 1, 2020
Destruction is in the eye of the beholder
