#thenewinquiry

summer reads u could pick up!! /// boycott the nyt’s 100% white booklist 

Ladan Osman, The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony

Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen

Abdourahman Waberi, The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper

Saraba, the Survival issue

Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

Eight New-GenerationAfrican Poets

We are so excited to introduce a the newest blogger at the New Inquiry. Keguro Macharia is a writer and professor based in Kenya. His new blog, Wiathi, is titled after the Kikuyu word for freedom/self-determination and will feature his thoughts on cultural production, Kenyan law, queer politics, and the black diaspora.

His inaugural post links #kasaraniconcentrationcamp, #Gaza, and #Ferguson and asks: How do the disposable survive?

Read his essays for TNI:

Wailing from the Kenya Refuses supplement

This is the editorial note to TNI Vol. 32: Back to School. View the full table of contents here.

Subscribe to TNI for $2 and get Back to School (and free access to our archive of back issues) today.

When white teachers in the New York City school district defied their union and their employer’s orders not to wear shirts bearing the NYPD insignia on the first day of school, signaling to the students in their care that they supported the choking death of Stat- en Island father Eric Garner at the hands of NYPD offi- cer Daniel Pantaleo, the Police Benevolent Association president issued the following statement of support for the rebel instructors: “Teachers wearing NYPD shirts to school only underscores the solid relationship that exists between rank-and-file teachers and police officers.” Many commenting on the protest noted the symbolic violence of teachers showing up to the first day of class in cop shirts when many of their students will be targeted by the NYPD on their way home from school. But what about all the other days of the school year, when classrooms are run by cops who show up in teacher shirts?

In many parts of capitalist society, school is where children encounter the social on their own for the first time. School is the way we take infants, exuberant in their generic individuality, and form them into legible bearers of their race, class, and gender. They must then simultaneously master such novelties as calendar time, asking permission to pee, how to become a version of themselves which is more excellent than all their peers, and how to live inside the confines of an externally imposed type.

School is the alibi for class society. Passage through it is supposed to be what makes the unequal distribution of violence and luxury in the bourgeois world a fair out- come, what makes the bodies it disposes of earn their disposal. It is also the house of knowledge and so a powerful node of induction into the mysteries of this bloody society. Those who want to approach the knowledge held there must also internalize its mechanisms. Some go on to help it reproduce itself, as teachers. Unexpected success in this self-transformation is sometimes called class mobility, but to celebrate those who are capable of moving admits that the majority are fixed in place.