I feel like I always see reading lists pop up that are all about “How to be Anti-Racist 101” and “Learning about your White (and Non-Black) Fragility”, which is really good! But I also think about those of us who have a good grasp on the basics, but have so much more to learn.
In my personal studio practice, I do a lot of research, and have friends who do a lot of reading, and we are always passing articles back and forth and talking about them via text and phone, and it is one of my favorite part of my friendships/of being alive and being able to read English. I get to listen, through reading, to the thoughts and analysis of so many wonderful folks who are alive and writing right now.
Here’s my quick attempt at putting some of those into a short reading list that feels relevant right now, so that we can all be better equipped to contribute to the Black Liberation and Freedom Movement.
Take care of yourselves out there. #blacklivesmatter
–satpreet
1. Bjenny Montero.
A drawing of a happy cartoon dog with a hardhat and sledgehammer running in front of a city skyline. The dog is whistling a tune and text in a box above reads: “Rip it up and start again”.2. Sherronda J Brown.
“This means that the mainstream will reject the philosophy entirely, or it will reject it and then accept it only after it has been sanitized. Only after it has been neutralized can it be rendered safe for consumption by those invested in maintaining the status quo. See: white liberal exaltation of Martin Luther King, Jr. only after the expulsion of his truly radical nature.”3. David Garneau.
“Gut instincts feel true not because they are ‘objectively’ correct, but because they offer answers we can live with. They are right for us in a particular moment. Most intuitions are sudden recollections masquerading as insight. They are personal preferences, social and experiential learning we naturalize as instinct or spiritualize as intuition. They feel right because they conform to and confirm settled opinion. Racism is an intuition of this sort.”4. Carolyn Lazard.
“Everything I have ever lived burrows in my cells and never leaves. It is ghost matter, the stuff of the past mixed up with the present. It’s the body, haunted. Here and also elsewhere. We are so obsessed with ignoring ghosts. They just keep slamming doors and flickering the lights. We keep complaining of drafts and old circuit boards as if it were an infrastructural problem. Sometimes, haunting or being haunted is the best way to describe an experience in the absence of words.”5. Lisa Pilar Cowan.
“It seems pretty clear that the way we have been operating as a society, including how we have been operating in philanthropy, is not working. Spending as we do, to protect the ability of our foundations to operate in perpetuity, doesn’t seem to recognize the reality of the moment we are in: urgent and scary — full of danger and also holding the possibility for change if we act decisively. In the past, when I have given something away, I have generally thought of it as a loss. Today, I am feeling that giving money and other resources away allows for gains that move us toward change and justice.”6. Paul B. Preciado.
“Governments are calling for confinement and telecommuting. We know they are calling for de-collectivization and telecontrol. Let us use the time and strength of confinement to study the tradition of struggle and resistance among racial and sexual minority cultures that have helped us survive until now. Let us turn off our cell phones, let us disconnect from the internet. Let us stage a big blackout against the satellites observing us, and let us consider the coming revolution together.”
