The August sunset burnished the room. People swarming in costumes–tangerine scarf and ballooning teal trousers on one woman, another with some kind of free-form jewelry, like golden arms encircling her neck. Men in suits and ties, younger ones in shirts with Beckett-styled hedged hair and Yeatsian rimmed glasses. Polyglot chatter: […]
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Mom, I dedicate this to you. And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth into my throat till I swallowed my blood. My voice was drowned in the roar of their voices, and my black wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as they bound me […]
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As a cisgender, pasty-white man, I’m often buffered from reality. Worse still, I’ve cloistered myself away from contemporary life by becoming a scholar of medieval theology. But recently, like a revelation, Youtube’s algorithms have connected me with an enchanting music video by Blood Orange. This song, “Augustine,” is a sensual, […]
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We all need a break. Despite the fact that the murder of George Floyd, among too many other Black Americans, jolted an important and overdue conversation about racial inequity to the forefront; we all felt drained from a year in which we lived through a deadly pandemic and an election […]
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The truth is that events coming to pass in the United States since the presidential election and the January 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol are so shocking to the sensibilities in what they portend for American democracy that they have in fact paralyzed us in speech and action. The […]
(for Cheryl Wall) I’ve known for awhile now that birthdays do not necessarily measure or accord wisdom, and for sure, their passage does not at all secure a body against shock and the harvest of grief and disappointment that seven decades of living in the United States (or […]
All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no justification, and that the West has no moral authority. James Baldwin, No Name in the Street We live in the era of the deleted tweet, and […]
I had the opportunity to interview artist Suné Woods about her commissioned video performance Suite Number Seven (2020), which will appear in the group exhibition Eco-Urgency: Now or Never in late August 2021. Suite Number Seven (4 min. 28 sec., 2020) is Woods’s commissioned contribution to Meshell Ndegeocello’s project, Chapter […]
1. In 1853, perhaps twenty-five minutes away from where I write this, the case that became Dred Scott v. Sanford began deliberations in what we now call the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, Missouri. Today, not only does the Old Courthouse sit near the banks of the Mississippi River, but […]
In his Biography of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell’s entry for Tuesday, September 23, 1777 (little over a year subsequent to the issuance of the Declaration of Independence of the 13 colonies, 41 of whose 56 signers, it is said, were slaveowners) reports the following: “He [Dr. Johnson] had always been […]
Although Donald Trump began his first electoral campaign by notoriously claiming that Mexicans were rapists, he managed early on to gain significant Latin American and Latinx support. In fact, already in the 2016 election Trump received more support (28%) from these groups than the previous Republican candidate Mitt Romney (27%). […]
1 If the desire to investigate the January 6 assault on the Capitol—to get to the bottom of what happened—has become so controversial that some people dispute whether there is anything to get to the bottom of, perhaps we should start with the bottom-line question: How could anything so prima […]
(Mourning Breonna Taylor’s Demise) Life’s sacred trust shatters, night’s peace extinguished, vitality’s hope destroyed: error blameless, intolerance swarming dereliction’s hatred, each time and place like every place and time vacancy’s insidious bloat slaughters life, devastation’s purpose fulfilled, human love wasted, sentient feeling stilled, power’s grotesque fantasy, self-appointed horror snuffing what […]
Our cry for the right to love (and be loved) is the fiercest and most radical revolutionary demand anyone could make. It is the demand for the complete liberation of the human body and spirit (with carnal fullness) into the transcendent capacity of our human existence, socially and personally. Love […]
