Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The only rule of travel is,
Don’t come back the way you went.
Come a new way …
There is no question I am someone starving.
There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is.

—Anne Carson / Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

“LATINOS” ARE ONLY THE LATEST GROUP TO LIVE AND WORK in intimate contact with “whites,” and to be assigned a legal and social status that separates them from the protections of whiteness. Before the arrival of African people, the principal terms of ethnic division in English North America were between “Christians” and “non-Christians” (i.e., Europeans and Native peoples). “White” became a legal category in seventeenth-century North America after the arrival of enslaved people from Africa.

— Héctor Tobar / Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

If the fracturing of our once stable climate doesn’t terrify you, then you don’t fully understand it. The reality is that, as far as we know, and in the natural course of events, our world has never — in its entire history — heated up as rapidly as it is doing now. Nor have greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere ever seen such a precipitous hike.

Think about that for a moment. We’re experiencing, in our lifetimes, a heating episode that is probably unique in the last 4.6 billion years.

— Bill McGuire / “I’m a climate scientist. If you knew what I know, you’d be terrified too” / CNN.com

Whereas the people who employ us enter their perfect, mortgaged spaces and practice an act of self-delusion every day; because in erasing us from their minds they deny how interdependent we are. As individuals, we are disposable to them; but we know that, as a collectivity, as a class of people, we are irreplaceable. Without us, without the labor of people of color, without our farmworkers and our mechanics, the citizens of the United States would wallow in their own filth and their cars would not run and their toilets would not flush.

We, as “darker” people, as outsiders and newcomers, are forced to study white people, as people of color have since the idea of whiteness and color were invented.

— Héctor Tobar / Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

i mean when we do go careening into the sun, 
i’ll miss crossing guards ushering the grown folks too, like ducklings  
and the lifeguards at the community pool and 
men who yelled out the window that they’d fix the dent in my car

— Eve Ewing / “eschatology”

The ideologues of whiteness have long told white people that their true, natural state is to live in an Eden of order and purity, emotionally and culturally separate from the Negroes, Puerto Ricans, aliens, and the other dark people who feed them, who clean up after them, and who build things for them. In the slave system, the contradictions inherent in this way of thinking began to tear at the nation’s conscience and its ethical fabric. The country’s moral conflict over slavery sparked more laws and rulings trying to enforce race discipline, culminating with the infamous Dred Scott decision, in which the chief justice of the Supreme Court boiled down the race thinking of white supremacy to its essence: Black people were not citizens and “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

— Héctor Tobar / Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

it’s madness
to hate the visitation
of grackles

— Uche Nduka / “A Green Dream”

What I’m Listening To:

Time, there isn’t much time now
What’s the fear, well, I like it here
With the ones I love so near
Maybe there’s just some way
Dear god
I can stay

— Eels / “Time”