More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 22 - April 2, 2023
survival is sometimes how to adapt until something better arrives. Be who you must be in the job interview or in the college admissions essay or with the elder you love but don’t respect. And then, as a reward for your survival, there may be a small world wherein you can thrive.
I’m thankful to be surrounded by this optimism, coming from these people. People who have likely seen worse than I ever have in my lifetime but have definitely seen more.
It is possible to teach dance, of course. But it is impossible to teach a natural ability to calculate the many ways you can get an audience to watch you, mouths hanging open, unable to speak.
The idea was that the French would be more tolerant and open to fighting alongside the Black soldiers, partially because they were in such desperate need of assistance to hold back overwhelming German assaults deep in the forests of France. Black soldiers fought bravely and were showered with praise by the deeply thankful French nation.
Still, the impact of that brief burst of Black creation in Paris struck new chords. Paris became obsessed with American Black artistic culture, right as the Harlem Renaissance started to kick off in the States. Parisians were mimicking American Black culture, but also, after World War I, word got back to the States that Paris was a place where Black folks were treated well.
To see the early performances of Josephine Baker in La Revue Nègre was to see someone taking the absurd stereotype and making it so absurd that it circled around to desire. The men laughed until they found themselves choking on all they wanted but could never have.
When the Nazis invaded Paris, Baker hid members of the French Resistance in the basement of her residence, a castle on the Dordogne River. Nazis showed up to search the home, but Baker stood in front of them, charming and flirtatious as ever. By the time she was done entertaining them, they’d forgotten to search the lower level, and they stumbled out of the castle under her spell, none the wiser.
Oh, friends—I most love who you become when there are cards in your hands. How limitless our love for one another can be with our guards down.
And in the months after we all pooled our money to pay John’s mom and even after we had to find a new spot to hang, I most remember the laughter that drowned the walls as Josh and Trevor sat, out of breath, on the floor next to the shattered television screen.
Where the radio was once primarily a vehicle for music, it now served multiple purposes. Between this evolution and the sheer number of young people flooding the economy and growing up with the times, an organic generation gap sprang forth. Young people were taking in more information than had ever been available before, and it was of course influencing their behavior in ways that the older generation couldn’t understand.
Like most panics, the concerns themselves were rooted in an idea that things were worse than they actually were, or at least that they could get even worse.
Within cycles of frustration or outright rage or comedic coping, there is inevitably a person or set of people who come out and decry the original sin with some boilerplate language about unity and choosing love over hate. These messages are oftentimes punctuated with some version of the same sentiment: This is not who or what America is. As
To insist that violence and any form of bigotry isn’t American is to continue feeding into the machinery of falsehoods and readjustments that keep this country spinning its wheels and making the same mistakes when it comes to confronting the way its past has burdened its present and future.
It’s the greatest trick: the reveal of a high-emotion resolution. It doesn’t show the interior lives of the Black players who still live in a town that was certainly still bubbling over with racism.
It isn’t that America loves films like these because they think the films themselves will fix racism. It seems, instead, that there is a love for these films because they make Americans believe that racism being fixed is something that can happen with a journey through some idyllic half-retelling of history.
Movies like these never approach the simplest and most honest idea: that racism is about power, and the solving of it relies—in part—on people being willing to give up power.
Even if the performances are singular, to push those performances to the forefront prioritizes a cycle that gives value to the roles Black people play when they are a part of work that reframes and recasts racism in service of white comfort.
History, both the arm holding down the drowning body and the voice claiming the water is holy.
The Green Book was about a communal passing of information to shepherd people to safety through autonomy, not about the watching over of a Black person by a white person in the role of savior.
Black people have been making ways for other Black people to arrive someplace safely for as long as there have been Black people in America and danger for them to run into, I suppose.
The Black relatives of Don Shirley had to take a back seat to the coronation of the film’s white creators, one of whom was Nick Vallelonga, the son of Tony Lip.
If only all movies about Black people struggling against the machinery of this country were, instead, movies about Black people living.
There can be no solution without acknowledgment, and so I don’t want anyone to watch this movie and consider themselves clean.
I would like to give Merry Clayton her roses because I have seen her name and cannot unsee the whole life she’s lived every time I close my eyes during the chorus of “Gimme Shelter.”
There were people who thought Clayton’s great flaw was that she could never pull away from her instincts to take people to church, no matter what a song’s content was asking of her. Imagine that, your greatest flaw being that you sing every word as if it were delivered to you by God.
And, like Baker, as she’s gotten older, Beyoncé has found ways to insert the political into the performance. The attempt being not only to start a conversation but to be a driving force and a guiding hand within the conversation.
And for those not at all familiar with the Black Panthers, the image was still clear. The intent was to foster either joy or freedom or discomfort or rage, depending on which eyes were taking in the scene.
It isn’t that I find myself afraid of a police officer coming into my house while I sleep and shooting me in my own bed. But I do think about the things on the body that could be mistaken for weapons, including the body itself.
the most jarring of all the stats was that white women voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton at a 52 percent to 43 percent clip. Resting underneath that, however, was that Black women overwhelmingly voted Clinton, at 93 percent. A lot of the conversation centered on the intersection of gender and power, and how white women will vote in the interest of the latter if it means ignoring all else. But what also began was a groundswell of appreciation for Black women that read as disturbing to me, largely because it was rooted primarily in their ability to fix the country, or labor on behalf
...more
The American obsession with immorality and a willingness to push its hardest labor off on its most marginalized is integral to the Black American experience, and so it occurred to me that maybe Black women were simply attempting to save themselves.
Beyoncé got five minutes as a supporting act at the Super Bowl and donned gold bullets and had Black women pick out their afros and adorn themselves in black leather because the alternative was America’s comfort.
When those same people arise only to applaud you for what they see as your desire to save them from themselves and the growing tab on their endless damage.
It’s easier to circle someone in an endless waltz of volume and eye contact than it is to tell them that they’ve made you very plainly sad. And so, there is beef, the concoction of which at least promises a new type of relationship to fill the absence.
But I think of it more often as a replacement of people and their histories.
None of them considered that the gang operates in multiple ways. One of the ways, for that neighborhood, was to keep unwanted hands off the land. To keep the buildings standing for as long as they could. Even if it meant wearing the face of the dead on a shirt.
The newest thing that cloaks me in fear is the idea that I’ve become too numb to a world that increasingly demands furious engagement.
There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument.
When the interviewers asked Buster Douglas what his plan was in 1990, days before the fight, he responded I’ll just hit him, I guess.
People ask me to offer them hope, but I’d rather offer them honesty. Black people get asked to perform hope when white people are afraid, but it doesn’t always serve reality.
If I am going to be afraid, I might as well do it honest. Arm in arm with everyone I love, adorned in blood and bruises, singing jokes on our way to a grave.
I go because it’s the only shop in town but I hate their politics but I gotta stay fly because I don’t feel like myself without a fresh cut. Let me try this again. I don’t feel like myself without something that makes me desirable to people I don’t know, and to know this is to know that the future of masculinity is probably not in the shape people want it to be.
I wrestle him to the ground and this is a demand for closeness. Even out of anger, I know that I want to be held.
and I touch my face and realize that there is a tear of my own crawling its way toward the split in my lip and I think the pain we’ve inflicted on each other is not the pain we are hurting from
The thing that was always hardest to acknowledge was becoming clearer: he was always better than me at making friends. He was, always, going to outgrow the part of our relationship where we had each other and only each other as windows to the outside world.
He could opt out of our home, and I couldn’t any longer. He could exit the spaces where we felt our closest bond, outside a world that measured the two of us up and found me leaving much to be desired.
I define loneliness by the way the water between my brother and I grows, and becomes more treacherous.
One of those Wu songs that really isn’t about anything other than the fact that none of us can be as we were when we were young. That a great deal of us have seen too much or heard too much or lived through too much to wrestle our innocence back from whatever cynicism or heartbreak has grown in its place.
Many artists—myself included—talk about making art for their people, but do it with the understanding that when the work itself enters the world, we lose control over it to some extent. Even someone we might not want to have access to it may get their hands on it and find something useful.
came up around Black folks who were angry. Sometimes, or often, angry at whatever foolish mishap I had found myself in. Or at least that is how the anger manifested itself.
The people I loved and the people they loved were likely mad at some other, more immovable injustice, but to yell at some unruly child let off enough steam.
