The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“… racism is about power, and the solving of it relies in part on people being willing to give up power.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib / A Little Devil in America

“… noncooperation with evil is just as much a moral duty as is cooperation with good.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr. / Stride Toward Freedom

“America, of course, is not better than this. When the entire architecture of a land is built on a chorus of violences, it takes an unnatural amount of work to undo every lineage of harm and then honor the harmed parties with anything resembling equity. Some of the first steps in that direction almost certainly rely on an honest assessment of not only the history, but the ways that history has generational impact.

To insist that violence and any form of bigotry isn’t American is to continue feeding into the machinery of falsehoods and readjustments that keep this country spinning its wheels and making the same mistakes when it comes to confronting the way its past has burdened its present and future.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib / A Little Devil in America

“… in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs…”

— W.E.B. Du Bois / The Souls of Black Folks

“… when they launch into the slow march of their song ‘Burn Ye Old White Male Patriarchy, Burn,’ Nyende leans forward, repeating the song’s title, chanting it while an audience member near me throws up a fist and shouts, ‘Burn!’ after each rotation. It becomes almost like a prayer, the words all folding into each other until the sentence becomes one word. A meditation, shouted with equal measures of rage and hope.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib / A Little Devil in America

“Empire, white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and homophobia are linked in complex ways, and our struggles against them require moral consistency and systemic analyses.”

— Cornell West / “Introduction,” The Radical King

“I’ve run out of language to explain the avalanche of anguish I feel when faced with this world, and so if I can’t make sense of this planet, I’m better off imagining another.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib / A Little Devil in America

What I’m Listening To:

“Burn Ye Old White Male Patriarchy, Burn
Burn Ye Old White Male Patriarchy, Burn
Burn Ye Old White Male Patriarchy, Burn
End white supremacy…”

FUPU / “Burn Ye Old White Male Patriarchy, Burn (Live)”