read real slow

“Colonialism tried to control the memory of the colonized; or, rather, in the words of Caribbean thinker Sylvia Wynter, it tried to subject the colonized to its memory, to make the colonized see themselves through the hegemonic memory of the colonizing center. Put another way, the colonizing presence sought to induce a historical amnesia on the colonized by mutilating the memory of the colonized; and where that failed, it dismembered it, and then tried to re-member it to the colonizer’s memory—to his way of defining the world, including his take on the nature of the relations between colonizer and colonized.”

“Mental health is defined as a state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community.”—World Health Organization (emphasis mine)

“To speak to whom? I take the implied audience to be those legal institutions that hold incarcerating power, or social spaces that hold exiling power. I must believe many people who have spoken out to power about their sexual assaults, especially those people whose speech isn’t often believed in any political context, know that they very well may not be believed, to the extent that belief would lead to consequences for the rapist. If they are looking for consequence.”

“We like to think of knowledge as virtuous, but its production can be violent. Not only did Sims perform surgery on unanesthetized women, but his experimentation with various surgical materials gave some of his subjects infections that stayed with them until death. He disabled. While slavery was a disabling institution in general, rendering physical ailments, early death, scarring, and trauma, that Sims extended this to “know” something useful for the treatment and care of women who were recognized as legal persons, even if partially so, is revelatory of the extractive and destructive structure of creating and protecting civil society.”

“…nothing is ever made available only to black people, no matter how hard we may try to cultivate the esoteric or mimic the proprietary. We have no sanctuary for such contemplation. I do not think black artists are saying that this is their exclusive province, but rather that they wrestle with the ethical question of representing the victims and effects of anti-black violence in ways that few non-black people (and maybe even many black people) ever come to appreciate. Meanwhile, what is taken to be black is taken for granted, openly available to all. That is a matter of virtually unrepresentable power, but it is also a structural impossibility to forestall the dissemination of signs, for better or worse.”

“How do we tell the story outside of the splash of sexual violence (and thus anti-blackness), since summoning the violence encountered by Black folks is so often bullied into doing the psychic, physiological, and affective dirty work for white supremacy? Whenever there is some type of crisis around “intimate” violences in particular, Black folks are summoned as ciphers through which that labor is accomplished without it having to affect the actual structures of white supremacy. Instead of confronting the many violences, sexual and otherwise, white men and women committed against Black female persons (“high crimes against the flesh,” Spillers calls it), the broken and torn black person, lynched, stands in as representative-knowable-enclosed-locked-down violence.”

“The atrocities of this antiblack, hetero­patriarchal, capitalist system evince the need for a new world entirely. And to bring that world about, we will most certainly have to be armed: with knowledge, with love, with community, with organization, with music, with a politics that threatens “an assault on the very fabric” of this one. We cannot hope to take part in the creation of a new world without threatening the present one. To continue thinking of ourselves as nonthreats by uncritically clinging to redeeming adjectives actively obscures the ontological menace that blackness represents not only to the police or to whites in general but to the coherence of the very category of “human.””

“Unemployed-black-lesbian-singe-mothers, one of the most abused segments of any population, also happen to be the most abused in Žižek’s prose. Their travails simply do not register within Žižek’s view of political/emotional economy—they are merely the butt of his jokes. […] For Žižek, the idea that unemployed-black-lesbian-single-mothers might make intellectual claims or political demands with universal implications is simply ridiculous on its face. Union activists, meanwhile, are something else entirely. But why assume that such women are not activists in Unions or critics of global capitalism? Thus Žižek reproduces not only the classic Marxist class-over-race paradigm, but also the class-over-gender/sexuality paradigm, along with the hierarchy of white over black, heterosexual males over lesbian females, and the west over the rest.”

recall this book ep118 violent majorities: indian and israeli ethnonationalism notes

i genuinely have no animosity towards ppl who get upset abt not being able to read academic texts + i do think we need to expand the pathways/methods of being exposed to critical concepts so that "sit + read for 2 hours" is not the only option.

There’s a really deep and well researched podcast on these kinds of black community massacres called Dreams of Black Wall Street. It’s covered the Greenwood, Tulsa and Okoe massacres as well as Rosewood and others. I already knew these things happened generally, but the set up of context, scope, details of the events and the generational effects that it illuminates, have both blown my mind and given me an even deeper appreciation for black survival and joy in country the United States, even though I was already about my people.