Jeff Scott > Recent Status Updates

“Nella stared at the girl, wondering where her lunch companion’s Black Panther spirit had gone. She’d moved from channeling her inner Baraka to her inner Barack—from confrontational to ­compassionate—in less than sixty seconds”

“Like most refugees we barely had any material belongings, even if our bags were packed with dreams and fantasies, trauma and pain, sorrow and loss, and, of course, ghosts. Since ghosts were weightless, we could carry an infinite number of them.”

“Nick thinks I’m a social climber. Very Minnesota of him. He can’t forgive people for their origins, and at the same time, he won’t forgive people for trying to overcome them.”

“You weren’t meant to look at people the way that Lieutenant Gatsby looked at Daisy Fay. You couldn’t peel your skin back and show them how your heart had gone up in flames, how nothing that had come before mattered and nothing that came afterward mattered as long as you had what you wanted.”

“Seeing him then, you knew he would remake the world for the object of his desire, but what a world it would be, and it wasn’t as if you could stop him. I knew Gatsby right then for what he was: a predator whose desires were so strong they would swing yours around and put them out of true.”

“The world had not seemed dangerous to him until that moment. That was the blessing of certain childhoods. The illusion of your invincibility. Your safety. Some people didn’t know the danger they were in until years later, looking back. That was a kind of blessing, too, in a way. The ignorance of your own peril.”

“Jail, convictions, violence, drugs, police, prison, and judges are facts of a life in the margins.... In the world I inhabit, you’re more than the record. But that record won’t let me leave the world I inhabit. Because there’s another world where the record is all that matters. It’s why they made the records, to keep people out. As long as I keep to my station, they won’t use it against me.”

“I squander the first book in a day. And curse myself. I have to hold the book close to my face to see the words. I devour the words. The Winner is the most beautiful book ever written. I curse myself as I near the end. I should have rationed the pages. Sips of clean water on a desert island. Made them last.”

“I hug the books to my chest. I sit on my bed mat and do that, just hold them a while. I open The Winner and smell the pages. I lick the pages. I’m weeping. I tell the voices I have books. I’m rich. Maybe I won’t go crazy.

“Funny what you can do to a kid when you tell yourself it’s for their own good, you’re saving their soul, when you tell yourself you’re serving God. They’d give me something to read. Make me write something about what I’d read. Pray about that and hope I’d shown sufficient contrition. ... I learned to shut off my mind, crawl inside the dark, and I wondered, Is this how you go crazy?”

“The way people look at you when you’re poor, the shame they need you to feel, it changes you, makes it hard to accept anything that feels like a handout. We fetishize poverty as though it makes you a better person. The truth is, all it does is make you mean. The constant stress of it. The never-ending fucking shame of it. It makes you angry and hateful.”

“Our situation was so tenuous that a couple days out of work, an infected throat, one misstep, and we’d slide, no bumpers to stop us this time. I didn’t know how long he’d been sick. Jobs like we had, you don’t call in sick. You work. You may infect everyone else, but you fucking work.

Or perhaps, once one begins,
There are only endings

It had occurred to me that all human beings are divided
into those who wish to move forward
and those who wish to go back.
Or you could say, those who wish to keep moving
and those who want to be stopped in their tracks
as by the blazing sword.

“The Mother looked at me for a moment, then she said: ‘It must be great. Not to miss things. Not to long to get back to something. Not to be looking back all the time. Everything must be so much more...’”

“A future generation, in retrospect, might have recognized the symptoms of creeping fascism that marked the Peekskill affair: hatred wrapped in the banner of patriotism; collusion of business interests, nativists, and racists; incitement by high officials and the media; and exaltation of violence as a redemptive force.”

“The most marvelous, unbelievable thing about Black people in America is that they exist. Every imaginable monstrosity that evil can conjure has been inflicted on this population, yet they have not been extinguished.
The hero remains.
Still.
And that is the most wondrous part of all.”

“Also implicated is the extent to which these questions can be left to democratic majorities or even empowered pluralities. Indeed, the doctrine of popular sovereignty would have left these questions to a vote. But true equality cannot be left to the whims of an electorate—it is the predicate for democracy and the vote, not their product.”

“... the NRA has never been a defender of African Americans who purchased weapons for self-defense against white terror. In the late 1960s, when Black Panthers carried weapons in public spaces, it was entirely legal in the state of California. When California passed some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country to disarm the Black Panthers, the NRA lent its support.”

“At critical turning points throughout history, people made deliberate choices to construct and reinforce a racist America. Our generation has the opportunity to make different choices, ones that lead to greater human dignity and justice, but only if we pay heed to our history and respond with the truth and courage that confronting racism requires.”

“The hypocrisy of white Christians who said their religion condemned darker-skinned people to perpetual slavery even as they worshiped a brown-skinned Jewish man who was put to death by an imperial power could hardly be starker, both then and now.”

“Part of what’s radicalizing young white men in destination cities and states, it seems to me, is a backlash against a decade of being chastised into checking their privilege and feigning shame or contrition over their historically oppressive identity. This is a backlash against a backlash, privilege rearing to battle antiprivilege”

“as invigorating and unifying as they are, protests don’t stop the mechanisms of power from proceeding as planned. Protesting is a form of direct democracy, but in America national policy is made by representative democracy.”

“The conclusion I have come to is simply this: racism behaves the way racism behaves. Racism wasn’t and isn’t geography dependent, but proximity-and-scale dependent. Black people fled the horrors of the racist South for so-called liberal cities of the North and West, trading the devil they knew for the devil they didn’t, only to come to the painful realization that the devil is the devil.”

“In the afterglow of it all, in the ash, what have we truly gained from this episode beyond displays of performative activism by organizations and allies, people cosplaying Black allegiance, and legislative tokenism that assuages white guilt and attempts to coax Black people into passivity, into quietly absorbing an endless oppression?”

“Most superheroes don’t know they’re superheroes until they get caught up in a moment, just like you. Something either overcomes them, showing them a glimpse of their hidden powers, or they’re pushed so far past their limitations that they have no choice but to succumb to whatever makes them most special.”

Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian painting, with no right for individualism, dictated to as the Indian has always been, put on reservations and treated like a child, and only the White Man knows what is best for him? Now, even in Art, “You little child do what we think is best for you, nothing different.” Well, I am not going to stand for it.

You don’t know how paralyzing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can’t do anything. The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas IS AFRAID of the truly passionate painter who dares – and who has once broken the spell of ‘you can’t’.

“Asking for fifty cents was like asking for a million dollars—when you don’t have it, you just don’t have it.”

“I thought of him and his whole life, how short it was. Forty. That isn’t much time. I was there with him when he loved someone, and he was willing to wait it out. I wondered whether, in life, you get one big role, some message you need to deliver to someone, and when it’s done, it’s time to go... He was wrong about me...I am not the kind of person who watches something happen in the distance.”