America imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And you can't hold those two views together without contradiction. Without depositing a kind of madness at the heart of the nation.
Black women are either stereotyped as terrible mothers or just bottomlessly maternal. And so I was really interrogating what does it mean to mother by choice? And what does it mean to mother not by choice?
When I um read Walden when I was a freshman in high school, I was just sort of like transcendentalism. This is like this is what I want wanted to do my whole life. I wanted to transcend how people see me because I was assigned male at birth and because I'm black and poor in the South. I want to transcend this body. I want to transcend like time and space. And I finally had a word um for what I longed to do and what I felt like I was here to do.
The claims of persecution behind this refugee program are based on this wildly debunked far-right conspiracy about South Africa. That white farmers are being killed by gangs of black South Africans and that their land is being seized by the government.
I wanted to transcend how people see me because I was assigned male at birth and because I'm black and poor in the South. I want to transcend this body. I want to transcend like time and space. And I finally had a word for what I longed to do and what I felt like I was here to do.
All throughout the north, black people are on high alert because slave catchers are out sort of like ICE, snatching people off the street, picking them up, throwing them in jail, throwing them in these holding pens, sending them back to slavery. Even if you were born in freedom, you felt like your life was at risk.
My grandfather kept Edward's secret right from the very beginning out of a sense of protectiveness for him. He knew that this was a very dangerous and risky thing that Edward was doing. Black men who were found to be posing as white could face all sorts of violence, even death in the Jim Crow era.
On this 250th birthday of the United States, the bill that would allow Mother Randall to be compensated is languishing in some congressional committee somewhere. Bills for black reparations for slavery have sat collecting dust for decades, but people convicted for their roles in January 6 came way closer to official government sanctioned redress than anybody in those groups. So, who counts as having been harmed by the state?
Part of the punchline of the book is that black people can't purchase an escape from racism. We can't buy ourselves out of anti-blackness in the US. Moreover, black people know this.
The word has two distinct pronunciations, she says, which signal entirely different meanings. The hard 'er' ending, she says, has historically been used as a weapon — a way of saying you are less than human. The soft 'a' ending, she says, is used within the Black community as a term of familiarity and even affection.
As a Black woman in this country, just about every right that I have is some type of law that can be overturned. And in my lifetime, I'm actively watching those efforts happen.
The word is doing a tremendous amount of work in American culture and society, and it's a problem that causes real harm to people. And one of the ways that we can actually address that problem with more than hand-wringing or more than shock is to actually understand how it works.
It's the most volatile word in the American language. It has been used to harm, to bond, to challenge, to unite, to separate. It's impossible to discuss American history, literature, and culture without it.
The word is doing a tremendous amount of work — it's marking race, it's marking power, it's marking intimacy, it's marking hatred, it's marking love. And what's extraordinary about it is that it can mark all those things simultaneously.
In the US, about eight out of 10 children from households with incomes below $50,000 a year have few to no swimming skills. That's according to the American Red Cross. About 64% of black children have few to no swimming skills. For Latino children, it's 45%. For white kids, it's about 40%. And you know, not to get all heavy, but these disparities around swimming line up with drowning deaths in the US, which are most likely to affect poor kids and kids of color.
1mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
