SPC

Celebrate the facts. Happy Black History Month! 

IMPORTANT INFO FOR WHAT’S CURRENTLY HAPPENING IN TRUMP’S AMERICA: a lot of unwarranted raids are happening across the U.S right now. The latest states that have been targeted by this massive sweep is California, Arizona, Texas, and now Georgia. Over 100 people have been detained, most likely without a warrant. And before someone says “they’re just keeping the criminals out!1!”, lawyers who were able to consult some of the people detained did not have a criminal record. There have also been reports of officers trailing kids walking home from school to lead to their parents.  These officers DO NOT. HAVE. THE RIGHT. TO DETAIN PEOPLE. WITHOUT. A WARRANT.  

“When I say the greatest athlete in a generation, I mean the greatest in any sport. Sorry, LeBron. Sorry, Tiger. Sorry, Derek. For fifteen years, over two generations of tennis, Williams has been a spectacular and constant yet oddly uncherished national treasure. She is wealthy and famous, but it seems that she should be more famous, the most famous. Anyone who likes sports should love Williams’s dazzling combination of talent, persistence, style, unpredictability, poise, and outsized, heart-on-her-sleeve flaws. 

But not everyone loves her. Part of this is owing to the duelling -isms of American prejudice, sexism, and racism…. 

…But it’s not enough to say that Williams would be more uniformly adored if she were a white woman, or a man. Instead, the failure to fully appreciate her importance is perhaps evidence of our inability to appreciate the stubbornly unfamiliar narrative arc of her career. Williams is underloved because, at times, she has been unlovable and, in the end, mostly unrepentant about it—something that might be admired as iconoclastic in a male athlete, but rarely endears women to a wide audience…. 

[Recently,] after a disappointing showing in the three previous Grand Slam tournaments, Williams said that she adopted a new way of thinking about the game, to put less pressure on herself by appreciating what she had already accomplished. ‘That’s the beauty of my career,’ she said before the Open. ‘I don’t need to do anything at all. Everything I do from this day forward is a bonus. Actually, from yesterday. It doesn’t matter. Everything for me is just extra.’ This is surely wisdom, but it is also a form of sports sacrilege. I don’t have anything to prove; I have been great—so great, in fact, that at this point winning doesn’t even matter.” 

Excerpted from an article by Ian Crouch for New Yorker Magazine

Photograph by Darron Cummings/AP

“This particular project is about my father, but it’s also about so many other people’s fathers. There are so many people who were involved in the Panthers,” she says. “So many people have a file like this on them, many of whom are still in prison, or many of whom might not have a child who happens to be an artist and can use their family as a way to talk about the greater black community and American history.”

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That whole exhibit is fucking amazing. It should be seen by everyone.