A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

by Hanif Abdurraqib

As I write this, it is almost election time in America again, and politicians are singing the old familiar song: America is better than anything their political enemies do. The separating of children from their families, the waves of drone strikes, the very violence beckoned by the presence of borders, any casualty that is the logical conclusion of the relentless desire to expand an empire. America is better than all of it, we’re told. America, of course, is not better than this. When the entire architecture of a land is built on a chorus of violences, it takes an unnatural amount of work to undo every lineage of harm and then honor the harmed parties with anything resembling equity. Some of the first steps in that direction almost certainly rely on an honest assessment of not only the history, but the ways that history has generational impact.