Organized by the 100 Black Men of West Texas, a Silent Solidarity Walk took place in downtown Lubbock on the evening of June 1st. By then, thousands of people were coming together across the nation to protest police brutality and systemic racism, so I eagerly attended the solidarity walk because I wanted the Movement for Black Lives to find a place in my West Texas town.
Our current pandemic is shocking, and almost unbearable. I cherish Waterlily’s relatives’ refusal of isolation. For most of this year, I have quarantined and distanced. I do this for the safety of myself and others. I am fortunate to have work and a stipend; but still, there is much I yearn for. I don’t know when this will end.
One of the key driving factors in Rankine’s conversations throughout Just Us is the idea of making space in conversations: for herself, for her conversational partner, as well as for the reader.
My entire educational experience has been one of a ruthlessly ugly racial project – fromnearly every school building […]
As I traversed this week’s readings, I recognized overlapping accounts of Black freedom struggle as a method of […]
Starting in July, Azerbaijan — backed by the Turkish, Israeli, and U.S. settler-states — has been attacking and terrorizing the Republic of Artsakh (also known as Nagorno-Karabakh), a 95% Armenian-majority sovereign entity and an ancient Armenian stronghold where indigenous Armenians have lived since antiquity.
For the colonized, rumor is a double-edged sword, limited in its utility as the ambiguity or unverified truth of the rumor simultaneously causes both fear and restricted mobility. Nevertheless, it is the evasiveness of it that allows undocumented communities to organize, move, or stay put with some sense of authority over their bodies, bodies which themselves are often in a constant state of strategic evasiveness.
The world I inhabit is one that first existed in imagination. Even though Jim Crow policed their bodies and their lives, activists protested and endured violence so that in a sea of raised white hands in a classroom, I could raise my own. Perhaps arriving at black liberation isn’t the point. The project of liberation will always be an unfinished one, a symphony amid composition.
One essential task of writers accompanying movements for social change is to make visible that which is hidden. Counternarratives are a practice in that visibility. They acknowledge that abolishing structures of domination must go hand in hand with eliminating ideologies of harm. When this concert between analyses of structural and ideological conditions is achieved, new visions of freedom are possible.
The curators of “Material Intimacies” have successfully created an exhibition that “examines intimacy as an encounter shaped by colonialism’s globalizing force.” Each artist uses the materials commodified for the colonial project in order to create art that is elevated in a white wall gallery space while forging new relationships and bonds in the face of violence, exploitation, and displacement.