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by
Imani Perry
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December 18, 2024 - February 9, 2025
FLORIDA IS A PISTOL. A body of stories, words, and deeds.
It is the beginning of what would be both the destruction and genesis that made the United States. The gold glinted in Spanish eyes. They looked for the Fountain of Youth. Theirs was a thirst that couldn’t be satisfied, but they made do, killing and driven by a vivid imagination.
In contrast, Puerto Ricans have been written into the nation-state as second-class citizens of the United States since 1917, with formal full citizenship but only partial voting rights as long as they live on the island. They are the victims of racism everywhere. More interestingly, I think, is how, despite the history and present of Florida and Texas (as well as California, Arizona, New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey), Latinos and, more broadly, Latinidad is depicted as “other” rather than indigenous to the United States, even as our three most populous states (California, Texas, and
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The obligation to “honor” in terms of enlistment is nonpartisan in Southern culture insofar as it consists of the duty to save face for the nation more than an articulated political ideology. And such service often requires self-effacement and suffering as well as great pride. “How long were you in the service?” is a deeply respectful question, laden with admiration in the South. The person who decries militarism, and I am one of them, must understand that Southern notions of valor have a logic that sits outside of what we call “politics.” It’s all politics, of course. But you will talk past
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Maybe I shouldn’t giggle at Frontierland or about how off the wall it is that Disney World still sells Song of the South souvenirs. It is laughing to keep from crying, sometimes. Other times, it is laughing at the woeful absurdity. Other times still, it is at the strangeness of humanity. Was this the misunderstanding? Perhaps I have a poor ear for laughter. Laughter need not be joyful. Hilarity is also an assessment. I wonder if we will ever tell the truth about the taste for cruel humor. Laughter does the same thing beauty does: allows for us to believe we can digest the indigestible. It’s
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While the South lost the Civil War technically, White Southerners did not in fact lose the war substantively. After all, Jim Crow, convict labor, and lynching happened with near total impunity, and African Americans experienced decades of pernicious neglect from the federal courts and government. Exploitation ran amok. Inequality persists. And the nation turning a refusing eye, allowing the Southerners to work out their own business over the lives of Black people on the land of the Indigenous all across the region, gave the South their victory lap. * * *
though Black support for the Clinton administration is frequently touted, a number of prominent African Americans were outspoken both about how Bill Clinton advocated for welfare reform with an approach that deepened extreme poverty, and played into a culture of poverty myths about Black people, and at the same time embraced policies and practices that destabilized and dispossessed Haiti. Black politics in Miami were both local and hemispheric. The most painful part is this: we mix and move and cross fates and link them. We are cast down and pushed aside in so many different ways, and yet so
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Miami is Southern because the South extends beyond the borders of the United States. It is the Global South and the American South as one. It took me some time to recognize this. It’s like how I was with the floral plastic bottles of Florida Water that I first saw in New York City bodegas.
Florida is a world of its own. It is also our company in kind.