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September 13, 2020 - April 22, 2021
But if, for example, as Jiménez Román said, 75.8 percent of Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico see themselves as white and as part of the general group of white people, even as others don’t see them that way, I see our conundrum.
but it’s phrases like “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row,” stated by US senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi while campaigning in a runoff election against Democratic challenger and African American Mike Espy, and Laura Ingraham’s “shut up and dribble” targeted at LeBron James, and, and, and, that come to mind
What does it mean to want a thing to change but then feel bullied by that change? Is understanding change? I am not sure. The playwright and poet Samuel Beckett once said that writing Waiting for Godot was a way of finding “a form that accommodates the mess.” Are conversations accommodations?
on either side of the equal sign, every sum will come to one—this one, what I want. Fuck you. Fuck me. Next. Do you, boo! Free to be. Free to take. Free to fake. Frivolous. Fuck brave. Fun. Funny. Good as hell.
That if Thomas Jefferson matters, so does Sally Hemings. That if D-Day matters, so does Black Wall Street. That if Valley Forge matters, so does Fort Pillow. Because the question really is not whether we’ll be tied to the somethings of our past, but whether we are courageous enough to be tied to the whole of them. Thank you.”
We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison…. Hitler, or Stalin, comes to look like a two-dimensional villain—someone whom contemporaries could not have seen as a human being. The Holocaust, or the Gulag, are such monstrous events that the very idea of rendering them in any sort of gray scale seems monstrous, too. This has the effect of making them, essentially, unimaginable. In crafting the story of something that should never have been allowed
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Until then, to forfeit the ability to attempt again, to converse again, to speak with, to question, and to listen to, is to be complicit with the violence of an unchanging structure contending with the aliveness and constant movement of all of us.
In 1965, when a white man, Jonathan Daniels, knocked her down thus taking a shotgun blast meant for her, fired by another white man, Tom Coleman, she says she stood between the best and the worst our democracy has to offer.
The murkiness as we exist alongside each other calls us forward. I don’t want to forget that I am here; at any given moment we are, each of us, next to any other capable of both the best and the worst our democracy has to offer.
