A Reader

Friends,

There are always more important things to do than read my newsletter, and I am eternally grateful that you continue to do so anyways. Here is my monthly offering.

• James Baldwin, 1 , 2 , 3 (video).
• “Many of them indeed know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger.”
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, 1 , 2 .
• “That Sunday, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of a 12-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about ‘hope.’ And I knew then that I had failed.”
• Ava DuVernay (video).
• “People say all the time, ‘I don’t understand how people could’ve tolerated slavery. How could they have made peace with that? How could people have gone to a lynching and participated in that? How did people make sense of the segregation, this white and colored-only drinking… That’s so crazy. If I was living at that time, I would have never tolerated anything like that.’ And the truth is, we are living at this time, and we are tolerating it.”
• Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah .
• “A state that flew the Confederate flag until a black woman named Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole and pulled it down. A place that still has a bronze statue of Benjamin Tillman standing at its statehouse in Columbia. Tillman was a local politician who condoned ‘terrorizing the Negroes at the first opportunity by letting them provoke trouble and then having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable…to rescue South Carolina from the rule of the alien, the traitor, and the semi-barbarous negroes.’
• Roof is what happens when we prefer vast historical erasures to real education about race.”
• ​ Nikole Hannah-Jones .
• “What if America understood, finally, in this 400th year, that we have never been the problem but the solution?”
• Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1 , 2 , or maybe it’s better to look at the reaction .
• “The legislation was not a product of charity of white America for a supine black America, nor was it the result of enlightened leadership by the judiciary. This legislation was first written in the streets.”
• Toni Morrison (video).
• “If you can only be tall because somebody’s on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”
• Trevor Noah (video).
• “What we saw with her was a really, really powerful, explicit example of an understanding of racism in a structural way. When she looked, when she looked at that man, when she looked at Cooper and she said to him, ‘I’m gonna call 911 and I’m gonna tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.’ She knew how powerful that was. And that in itself is telling, you know? It tells you how she perceives the police. It tells you how she perceives her perception or her relationship with the police as a white woman. It shows you how she perceives a black man’s relationship with the police and the police’s relationship with him. It’s, it was, it was really, it was, it was, it was powerful. ’Cause so many people act like they don’t know what, what black Americans are talking about when they say it, and yet Amy Cooper had a distinct understanding.”
• Claudia Rankine .
• “And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.”
• Jamil Smith .
• “But despite actually seeing the brutalization of our bodies in more vivid detail than ever before, the police and government have remained unmoved. I tremble to think what act, or accompanying footage, will be required for the powers that be to finally see what’s going on.”
• Bryan Stevenson .
• “When no crime was discovered and nothing incriminating turned up in a computerized background check on me, I was told by the two officers to consider myself lucky. While this was said as a taunt, they were right: I was lucky.”
• Ida B. Wells .
• “Agitation, though helpful, will not alone stop the crime. Year after year statistics are published, meetings are held, resolutions are adopted and yet lynchings go on. Public sentiment does measurably decrease the sway of mob law, but the irresponsible bloodthirsty criminals who swept through the streets of Springfield, beating an inoffensive law-abiding citizen to death in one part of the town, and in another torturing and shooting to death a man who for threescore years had made a reputation for honesty; integrity and sobriety, had raised a family and had accumulated property; were not deterred from their heinous crimes by either education or agitation.”

More .

Money .

Unrelated reading:

• Inauguration .
• Simon Anthony and Sudoku.
• Teju Cole on Covid and grief
• Ross Gay and Noah Davis on basketball.
• Scaachi Koul on food and people.
• Dan O’Brien on Youngstown, Ohio.
• Gabriella Paiella on Steve Buscemi.

-g