Ordinary Notes

by Christina Sharpe

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There was a whiteboy named ████

Fine calls Eckford, “This little girl, this tender little thing.” Which of the white people who witnessed and participated in my abuse thought that?

My mother wanted me to build a life that was nourishing and Black.

My mother wanted me to live in spaces where I would be reflected back to myself without particular distortions.

Ida Wright Sharpe Wayne

Poetry book

“overly…Latino.”

Ida Wright Sharpe Wayne

The children are made to stand as an entry point into the past—as a point of empathy.

wondered about the curatorial decision to absent adult figures from the grounds and the buildings; a void opened, a palpable absence.

Much of the plantation focuses on the children, their lives in slavery, and how often and how young they died. Were these child sculptures meant to

Ugh why

To move visitors, these sculptures could not be adults.

Innocence as a form of dissociation

coalesce around Black presence, in which adults won’t generate sympathy in the past as they don’t into this future. Adults are reminders of the stakes, the culpability, the debt, the entanglements, and the ongoing brutality of slavery’s afterlives.

“What is obscene [here] is not a relation to The Past, but the dishonesty of that relation as it would happen in our present.

The “past” fails to stay in the past.

but we can’t get to liberation if we don’t acknowledge what we’ve done.”

How does one come to terms with a brutal imagination

“Shared experiences in the realm of the social do not necessarily index shared positions in the realm of the structural.”[23]

and the inventory of the violated and the murdered continues.

Do you consider the impact your film will have on Black people in the room before you show it?

Where are the responses to the “political arithmetic”[24] in the present by which Black children around the globe continue to be subjected to every form of violence?

Every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its failure.

But second, and more importantly, I do not reply to her because with her apology, she tries to hand me her sorrow and whatever else she is carrying, to super-add her burden to my own. It is not mine to bear. I have my own sorrows.

to quote Patricia J. Williams, “hatred is learned in the context of love.”[42]

NOTE 43 We are called

This

What if the project that white people took up was to locate each of the white people who appear in the crowds of those lynchings, those who posed for photographs and those others who appear in the background?

“The frame of the doorway is the only space of true existence.”[49]

NOTE 48 Antidote

“The wild idea that animates this book is that young black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world must be otherwise.”[56]

The terrible price that is slavery, that is torture, that is living while those you struggle alongside die, is both extracted from Marie Ursule and given. “This is but a drink of water,” she says, “to what I have already suffered.”[58]

Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.[60]

wrong. That day, at least, although there was harm done, it was not immediately fatal harm. Knowing that every day

Ma’ams, abducted Africans forced over on those slave ships with names like Antelope and The Phillis and Formiga and those born into slavery on these “New World” grounds, counters the racist ledger-knowledge of the whiteman called Schoolteacher.

I am annoyed by the phrase Black excellence. It doesn’t do the affirming work that many people who deploy it imagine that it does. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson gets it precisely right when she tells me that “Black excellence” is the answer to a racist question.[66]

Stories in and of themselves aren’t right or wrong. Who writes, how one writes—as in from what subject position—and what one writes matters.

It matters because while films, novels, plays, and poems are works of imagination and are not collapsible into the narrowly political, all work arises out of particular spaces/places/needs/and times, all works are produced

This is not a question of positive representation; it is a question of power and angle of vision.

Whiteness as a political project that sorts oneself and others into categories of those who must be protected and those who are, or soon will be, expendable. Many in the media float white supremacy as if it is in a fixing solution—deploying it, exonerating it from its lethal work with “the exonerative tense.”[79]

reality, these white people are always extended grace—and the grammar of the profoundly human. They are the human.

There is a certain mode of reading connected to a tradition of colonial practices in which every book by any Black writer appears as sociology. Then all of that book’s explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity.

To sing “Amazing Grace” is to mispronounce the song.

Who is in need of redemption? “Amazing Grace” is about Newton’s journey; it has nothing to do with the horrors and terrors of slavery for the enslaved.[104]

The torturer insists that he cannot remember. The tortured insists that he cannot forget.

You do not have to save the things that kill you.

I used to think that if I started crying, I would never stop. That if I allowed myself to cry, the weeping would never end.

What do I love that won’t let me rest?

Breathing is the beginning. It is, for us, a first and final movement.

complete catalogue of coloniality; a file, a list, a book, an enumeration usually consistent with coloniality, containing information where Black life may limn through but not be deemed as subject of the information; libraries where these are held; a compendium usually fissured, listings of events, seams from which Black life must be extracted, extrapolated; interpretations

Neither looking at nor seeing through the perspective of Black people, a Black gaze renders our relationship to blackness in an antiblack world palpable, in ways that require us to reckon with our distance from or intimacy with the disposability of Black bodies. A Black gaze challenges us to embrace the affective labor of grappling with uncomfortable gaps between proximity and protectedness and in doing so, opens up the possibility of a future lived otherwise.

Abolition is one manifestation and a key call of this epoch of Black liberation. It refuses the logics of property. It refuses the ways that the states we live in and the mechanisms of those states in this moment have consolidated the carceral.