The radical and perpetually unpredictable voice of Percival Everett
Neglect is a fate all experimental writers risk, but if they happen to be black it can seem almost impossible to avoid. Everett always intended to chart his own course. He picked the novel up where Ishmael Reed had taken it, but pivoted away from Reed’s zaniness toward a prismatic allegorical realism, a constant reinvention of form designed to grapple with the vertiginous ends of America’s violent and often contradictory racial, economic, geographic, and sexual epistemologies—a project consonant in many ways with Wallace’s—but evidently not one that could generate the same kind of popular appeal.
I set about visiting old haunts that summer, but soon realized few were left.
We had been gentrifiers, more humble and open than most, we assumed, and now our time to be called back into service had come again. There were surely other areas in premium metropolitan cultural centers out there that had lapsed to Negroes in the years after the Great War which remained affordable for the mostly white American middle class of 2015, and we’d have to go find one. He was, quite naturally, thinking about moving to LA, a cliché in the Brooklyn we were inhabiting, especially among the middle-class creatives who fashioned themselves as priced out, a sensation that inspired a cottage industry of Didion imposters writing “Goodbye to All That” imitations on the websites of once-veritable magazines. This is not, despite appearances, one of those. I remain too stubborn to read the writing on the wall.
Wilders’s argument is, in effect, that multiculturalism is the opposite of diversity. At a Koblenz conference hosted by Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, he warned in that the totalitarianism of the EU and political correctness would reduce the wonderful variety of nations to a “uniform multicultural society.” (He also said that “women are afraid to show their blonde hair,” which is new to me.) But he owes so much to the “politically correct” vocabulary of “rights” and “identity” that he claims to reject.
As allies flooded in, indigenous leadership was increasingly drowned out in a sea of noise.
As yurts were built left and right and kale arrived by the truckload, I began to see that Standing Rock was gentrifying. White people had arrived in a space that was not our own and tried to improve it according to our standards. We ate foods cooked by our poorer, browner neighbors and learned a few words in their language. We improved the housing stock and brought newer, greener technologies. But as we tried to help, we simply got in the way.
Making airports great again at the Trump rally in Melbourne, Florida.
There’s a distant sucking sound in the sky, which excites the crowd. Several phones point skyward. Air Force One is powder blue and descends, ponderously and slowly, above the waiting crowd’s heads. They must have planned it this way, because though the sonic ripples are deafening, the plane’s approach rouses a cheer so raucous that the two sounds fight, which only whips up the rally-goers more.
Thirty-six black churches in Mississippi burned during the Freedom Summer of 1964, a campaign to register black voters in Mississippi. That’s twelve churches every month, three every week, and one every three days. Any black person visiting a church for worship, voter registration, or other services knew they might die in a blaze.
Wasn’t Pogofest the type of idea barely solvent towns pay marketing consultants millions of dollars to avoid?
The Okefenokee once took up a lot of room in the collective American unconscious. It was a space of danger and lascivious wonder, a kind of mystical hayseed Vegas.
The greatest violence at every convention in memory has been perpetrated by the state.
The current “strategic incapacitation” approach to policing protests can have a chilling effect not only on protesters in the streets on a given day but on whole movements.
We are rarely granted the privilege of victimhood. We are instead accused of victimizing ourselves.
The young men and women who died have already become tokens for whoever claims them best. Which fraction of their identity will win out in public memory?
Race in the United States is marked by a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, there has been considerable progress: segregation enforced by the rule of law is a thing of the past, and segregation at the level of mainstream culture, though persistent, is considered a scandal. On the other hand, today’s postracial America of Kimye and Pharrell is still the era of the New Jim Crow and entrenched black poverty. Diversity in elite universities exists alongside de facto residential segregation, and a black president administers a minority-dominated prison system.
Segregation, separatism, and the history of black barbershops
I went to that black barbershop for the reason millions like me have done so before—to feel at home. But for years, as Quincy Mills’s fascinating Cutting Across the Color Line reveals, black barbershops in America were unavailable to people of my lineage and color. Though they became a stereotypical image of a black social institution, crystallized best in Barbershop, they began as institutions of segregation and white supremacy. In the antebellum era, but also well into the period of Reconstruction, black barbershops—predominantly in the South but often in the North—only served white men.
On Fanon and the ethics of anticolonial resistance
“Concerning Violence” is something other than a straightforward entreaty to revolutionary action. It is an encouragement to face the specter of absolute violence, from both sides of the imperial divide, and decide where we stand politically and ethically in relation to it.
The photographs of Nakeya Brown spark a list of questions. What is a hot comb? What is a weave? Why do you burn or boil the edges of braid extensions? Each of these are little entry points into the unexplored and overlooked private lives and private decisions of black people, black women specifically.
Paul wore several dense rings on his large hands as he gave the $5 tours and left the impression that he was not above using them in a mix-up. His charm melted away at the edges of a subtle menace he exuded. If he caught a visitor staring off into space as he was talking, he’d often grab their shoulder forcefully or pound on it twice with a backhanded closed fist, saying “Yo, Yo!” until he was confident that he had regained their attention.
This new episode of the n+1 podcast celebrates the release of City by City. First, co-editor Stephen Squibb talks about the City by City project and why we love writing and reading about cities. Then, Brandon Harris discusses his essay on Bedford-Stuyvesant, the neighborhood’s cultural history, and gentrification in Brooklyn.
Occasionally news crews would insinuate themselves into the crowds and pretend to understand what was happening. “I’m hearing lots of cries for freedom and justice here, not rioting” one newscaster said, authoritatively, while someone next to him continually interrupted: “This is about racism, not rioting. Say the word. This is about state-sponsored murder! Say it!”
Increased surveillance, tape-recorded representations of life, played back and rewound and remixed over and over again, digitally and virtually, will only remind jurors of an imitation of life, but it won’t revive the real thing. Rather than die knowing my death had been recorded by the camera, I would just rather not die. And rather than not die, I would like to choose to live.
The radical and perpetually unpredictable voice of Percival Everett
Neglect is a fate all experimental writers risk, but if they happen to be black it can seem almost impossible to avoid. Everett always intended to chart his own course. He picked the novel up where Ishmael Reed had taken it, but pivoted away from Reed’s zaniness toward a prismatic allegorical realism, a constant reinvention of form designed to grapple with the vertiginous ends of America’s violent and often contradictory racial, economic, geographic, and sexual epistemologies—a project consonant in many ways with Wallace’s—but evidently not one that could generate the same kind of popular appeal.
I set about visiting old haunts that summer, but soon realized few were left.
We had been gentrifiers, more humble and open than most, we assumed, and now our time to be called back into service had come again. There were surely other areas in premium metropolitan cultural centers out there that had lapsed to Negroes in the years after the Great War which remained affordable for the mostly white American middle class of 2015, and we’d have to go find one. He was, quite naturally, thinking about moving to LA, a cliché in the Brooklyn we were inhabiting, especially among the middle-class creatives who fashioned themselves as priced out, a sensation that inspired a cottage industry of Didion imposters writing “Goodbye to All That” imitations on the websites of once-veritable magazines. This is not, despite appearances, one of those. I remain too stubborn to read the writing on the wall.
Wilders’s argument is, in effect, that multiculturalism is the opposite of diversity. At a Koblenz conference hosted by Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, he warned in that the totalitarianism of the EU and political correctness would reduce the wonderful variety of nations to a “uniform multicultural society.” (He also said that “women are afraid to show their blonde hair,” which is new to me.) But he owes so much to the “politically correct” vocabulary of “rights” and “identity” that he claims to reject.
As allies flooded in, indigenous leadership was increasingly drowned out in a sea of noise.
As yurts were built left and right and kale arrived by the truckload, I began to see that Standing Rock was gentrifying. White people had arrived in a space that was not our own and tried to improve it according to our standards. We ate foods cooked by our poorer, browner neighbors and learned a few words in their language. We improved the housing stock and brought newer, greener technologies. But as we tried to help, we simply got in the way.
Making airports great again at the Trump rally in Melbourne, Florida.
There’s a distant sucking sound in the sky, which excites the crowd. Several phones point skyward. Air Force One is powder blue and descends, ponderously and slowly, above the waiting crowd’s heads. They must have planned it this way, because though the sonic ripples are deafening, the plane’s approach rouses a cheer so raucous that the two sounds fight, which only whips up the rally-goers more.
Thirty-six black churches in Mississippi burned during the Freedom Summer of 1964, a campaign to register black voters in Mississippi. That’s twelve churches every month, three every week, and one every three days. Any black person visiting a church for worship, voter registration, or other services knew they might die in a blaze.
Wasn’t Pogofest the type of idea barely solvent towns pay marketing consultants millions of dollars to avoid?
The Okefenokee once took up a lot of room in the collective American unconscious. It was a space of danger and lascivious wonder, a kind of mystical hayseed Vegas.
The greatest violence at every convention in memory has been perpetrated by the state.
The current “strategic incapacitation” approach to policing protests can have a chilling effect not only on protesters in the streets on a given day but on whole movements.
We are rarely granted the privilege of victimhood. We are instead accused of victimizing ourselves.
The young men and women who died have already become tokens for whoever claims them best. Which fraction of their identity will win out in public memory?
