The Best Stuff I Read This Week

California banned slavery in 1849. California law allowed
Native people to be enslaved in 1910.

— Allison Adelle Hedge Coke / Look at This Blue

. . . I have been haunted by the human capacity to use creativity and imagination to such deadly ends. I would like to think that we are better off in the United States, but when you look at what was done in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, we are only wealthy enough to keep it offshore. In the United States, we have the money to create weaponry that removes us from the violence we enact. By contrast, in the Congo, the mixture of poverty and war is a lethal combination. Due to a lack of money, the human body becomes the weapon, the teenage boy the terror, and a woman’s womb “the battleground.”

— Kate Whoriskey / “Introduction” to Lynn Nottage’s Ruined

O god of guayaba’s split red belly
O god of  the soldier taking your wedding ring
O god of young cursing teeth
O god of  the baseball stadium where,
in 1966, a soldier stood on third base
and sent hundreds of men to work
the sugarcane fields.

— Jordan Pérez / “O God of Cuba”

CHRISTIAN: But we have to pretend that all this ugliness means nothing. We wash the blood off with buckets of frigid water, and whitewash our walls. Our leaders tell us: “Follow my rules, your life will be better,” their doctors say, “Take this pill, your life will be better,” “Plant these seeds, your life will better,” “Read this book, your life will be better,” “Kill your neighbor, your life will be better—“

— Lynn Nottage / Ruined

If every bomb
Appeared in the sky a dove
Shrapnel into rain

If vengeance vanquished
From the cursed lips of weak men
An idea never taking root

— Tony Medina / “Seven Steps to Heaven Haiku”

“White” was invented five hundred years ago to describe the privilege enjoyed by one group of people, and to justify the exploitation of “Black” people. In the words of James Baldwin, “White is a metaphor for power.” And today, it remains both an assertion of racial superiority and a declaration of a twisted notion of freedom. To be white is to have entered a world free of the pain of history, an abstract space where opportunity and individualism rule. The racial and ethnic labels of the United States are old and imprecise and illogical; and yet they dominate our lives in the present.

— Hector Tobar / Our Migrant Souls

We don’t have to be rapacious. That is not who we necessarily are. We have built an economy that is relentless in its consumption and does not conform to natural law, but we don’t have to do it that way.

— Robin Wall-Kimmerer, to Andrew Boyd / I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor

What I’m Listening To:

Bright every day, I wake up
Look at my travels, they’re scuffed up
Ring goes the telly, which I pick up
Turn on the news as it screws up

— De La Soul / “Freedom of Speak (We Got Three Minutes)”