The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“… neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.”

— James Baldwin / Notes of a Native Son

“In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women.”

— Audre Lorde / Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“And he, the boy who never grew up, aloft the Omega, a golden filament in the vibrant violet light.”

— Patti Smith / “He Was Tom Verlaine”

“he is not gesturing for rescue
he is shouting ‘go away’”

— Richard Shelton / “Local Knowledge”

“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

—Frederick Douglass / Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“to hell with the arms you want
she hissed,
be glad when you’re cold
for the arms you have”

—Lucille Clifton / “poem to my yellow coat”

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”

— James Baldwin / Notes of a Native Son

What I’m Listening To:

“Lead me to another life
All my ties are broken
I’m in wonderful
Disarray”

— Loma / “Ocotillo”