Albert Parsons, writing in The Alarm (1884):

One man has no right to live on the profits of another man’s labor, under any excuse whatever. He who stands on what another man produces, stands on that man. No matter what the pretext, he is standing on him wrongfully. The under man should knock off the burden and not be longer bamboo-zled with the idea that he should be patient, for perhaps by and by he may be on top. Down with such nonsense!

On posting (scholarly) things with which we disagre:

Whilst sparking outrage might be one way to lift an altmetric, the professional encouragement of academics to use social media can also be a serious occupational mental and physical health hazard….We need to begin conversations about the responsibility an academic has in critically, ethically, and safely distributing work, not just critically engaging with it.

Dr. Naomi Barnes writing in LSE Impact Blog

The non-indictment of Breonna Taylor’s killers came out a few hours before my evening class was to start. (Note: Brett Hankison was indicted for wanton endangerment unrelated to her death.) This isn’t the first time I’ve taught through a moment of racial violence. I know it won’t be the last. The impulse to address the moment is important, and there usually aren’t easy steps. So I’m sharing mine. Here’s are the pivots I made tonight. As always, I’m open to feedback, for I know I don’t have it all right.

I started class by acknowledged the moment we are in and the most urgent facts that students might or might not know. Breonna Taylor was killed 6 months ago in a botched police raid. Just announced in Louisville, no officers would be indicted for her murder. The “wanton endangerment” indictment is unrelated to murder. I emphasized that, for those of us following this story, we carry this stress and trauma in our bodies to class tonight. The ways we live through this stress depends on our own racial proximity to and experience of racial violence. It’s typically less if you are white. It’s more if you’re Black.

I also called the name of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, who was killed in a botched police raid in 2010 on the eastside of Detroit — for which there was no kind of justice. I said her name and explained this event so students would know that this particular kind of anti-Black, state-sanctioned violence (the botched raid) is a pattern — even here in Michigan. I told students how even today, organizers in Detroit say her name, paint her in murals, and carry her tiny legacy forward. She is known and remembered. Students needed to know this.

I told white students that no matter how badly they felt, their feelings would subside before folks of color. I told them that this applies to me as well since I am white. I told them they should think about their actions and the grace they should give the folks of color around them. I wish I would have given them specific examples of such actions I’ve taken and should have taken in the past. I told them that it’s not just their peers. It’s their professors too — especially Black women professors they may have. They are reliving trauma and fears. I told students they needed to know this.

I told students that the constant news cycle can be overwhelming and unhealthy. It can make the entire problem seem beyond their control. I suggested they think about what is in their locus of control. And one thing that is (aside from voting!) is recommitting yourself to studying to understand the roots and shapeshifting nature of white supremacy and racial violence. I said it’s not enough to know that something is wrong. You need to know how and why. You know when you’re sick. You to go the doctor to understand why so it can be fixed. Understand the nature of the problem so you can be of service where you are. I had planned to tell them to read Kimberlé  Crenshaw’s original article on intersectionality. (Dig into the classics!) To read Angela Y. Davis’s book Are Prisons Obsolete? if they were just now hearing about this idea of abolition. To read Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage. I wanted to give them specific things to read even though it’s outside of the course focus. I didn’t though. I don’t know why. So I need to follow up. It’s not enough to tell them to study without giving specific steps.

I told them that I fear it may be superficial, but as the organizer and leader of the class, I’m making the decision that the time we spend together in class tonight will be to honor the life of Breonna Taylor. What I didn’t tell them is that this idea comes from the Eucharist — that in some Anglican parishes, the rector may dedicate the Eucharist to someone who died recently. This is where the idea came from and why – at least in my private thoughts – it’s not an empty gesture. I told them the time we spend together and the focus you offer toward your education in this class period will be to honor her life. I told them people miss her profoundly right now. They miss what she sounded like. They miss what her neck smelled like because they hugged her in the kind of way that your face is in the other person’s neck. They miss all these things about her. We don’t and we can’t. But we’ll speak her name and offer our time to her life – as superficial as it may sound.

I then gave students a 5 minute break. Because somebody has to set up the zoom breakout rooms.

Out this week: Issue #32 of my newsletter covers sound art from Detroit, collages from Krista Franklin, and more.

Roger Bonair-Agard on the break:

To consider the breadth and depth of what the break beat means, and how it can be deconstructed, is to understand first of all what it means to build and compose a music from such corridors of already existing music; what it means to build a completely new sound, a new series of tunnels down the cave to the place where bass lives. To consider the break beat, therefore, is a kind of hajj, a journey that must not be lightly taken. Where the break leads is a treacherous place and desperation has sent its composer there. What she uncovered is sacred for what she has had to endure to get there. What you are witnessing is a religion that might change you forever. Indeed it must.

It’s go time at Science Gallery Detroit.

I read with great interest the writing on white American evangelicals and their relationship with Donald Trump. Monday’s newsletter sent out to the inner circle contains highlights of this work.

Last month a group of school leaders asked us what we thought about police in their schools. We only had a few minutes left in our 3-hour session. I wasn’t satisfied with my response. Here is what I should have said and will next time:

The what is simple: get police out of your school; use those resources to fund counselors, community mentors, and restorative justice. The how is bit more complicated, but that’s only because there are so many ways to do actually do it, and you have to come to consensus on one approach. And you’ve already answered the why — that you should get police out of your school because their presence undermines the very function of your schools for the students you are consistently already underserving. 

Your concern is probably about something else: white parents. You’ll have to muster the courage to withstand the rage white parents will deploy when you take this deliberate stance toward protecting the spirits of Black children in schools. It’s not because white people hate Black children. It’s because white people love police. We’ve imagined them as our protectors since childhood, intervening between us and the dark bodied threads we invent, imagine, or hear about — usually from other white people. As adults, we believe police will do the same for our white children when they are in close proximity with dark children in schools. Those of us who no longer love the police didn’t get to this stance on our own. We got here most likely by seeing the terror police have inflicted on specific Black people we know by name, touch, and voice who we also — by some circumstances — came to love. If we hadn’t come to love these Black people, we would still love the police. 

Someone I don’t know very well but nonetheless respect once said to a big room of people, “Leadership means disappointing white people.” I don’t know if it matters in this instance — but I’ll say it because you’re probably wondering — but she is white, just like most of you. So I wonder how you might become free to do what you know in your belly is right if you accept that you absolutely will provoke and under all circumstances must withstand the rage of white parents in order to do your job. 

Did you see the miniature record store for mice that popped up in Sweden? This and other small treats in issue #31 of my newsletter, Elements & Embodiment.

Chadwick Boseman on T’Challa’s speech:

People think about how race has affected the world. It’s not just in the States. Colonialism is the cousin of slavery. Colonialism in Africa would have it that, in order to be a ruler, his education comes from Europe. I wanted to be completely sure that we didn’t convey that idea because that would be counter to everything that Wakanda is about. It’s supposed to be the most technologically advanced nation on the planet. If it’s supposed to not have been conquered – which means that advancement has happened without colonialism tainting it, poisoning the well of it, without stopping it or disrupting it – then there’s no way he would speak with a European accent.

If I did that, I would be conveying a white supremacist idea of what being educated is and what being royal or presidential is. Because it’s not just about him running around fighting. He’s the ruler of a nation. And if he’s the ruler of a nation, he has to speak to his people. He has to galvanize his people. And there’s no way I could speak to my people, who have never been conquered by Europeans, with a European voice.

Me: Can’t wait to start class tomorrow! Here’s the zoom link! C-ya then!

Every student in class: Um professor we don’t start class until next Wed.

Me: Right, right. C-ya next week!

Le fin.

Issue #30 of Elements & Embodiment went out to the inner circle on Monday. It touches on Renee Gladman’s Prose Architecture, a turntable lesson in the park, and what I’m reading, writing, & hearning.

From a wise colleague:

We cannot overstate how much our whole human selves need to be seen and acknowledged at this moment. We must fight alienation at every level, in speech and deed.

I had been wondering when it would happen, and it is today: “pandemic” is in the title of an article submitted to the academic journal I co-edit.

Feedback:

I question whether race intentionally — alone — as you set it up, is a meaningful strategy of change. That is, in light of the racial and linguistic shifts in schools, why is race intentionally as a practice the one to forward rather than, for example, explicitly anti-racist pedagogies? Will race intentionally shift language ideologies in equitable directions? Another point worth considering in this regard is the need to resist a hard distinction between educators who are race evasive and race intentional. The second wave of critical whiteness studies explicitly resists the either/or framing of whiteness and white folks. I recommend you draw more deeply on this body of work to highly how race evasiveness and intentionality among educators is complex, shifting, and contextual – most certainly not an either/or practice.

His questions:

Where does the sound come from?

How does the sound come out?

What do the little circles do?

Is this a record player?

What happens if you play it upside down?

Why does it start spinning when you move the arm?

What does this switch do?

Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm.

Lefebvre in Rhythmanalysis.

Elizabeth Dias writing in the New York Times, “Christianity Will Have Power.” >Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are. He is their protector, the bully who is on their side, the one who offered safety amid their fears that their country as they know it, and their place in it, is changing, and changing quickly. White straight married couples with children who go to church regularly are no longer the American mainstream. An entire way of life, one in which their values were dominant, could be headed for extinction. And Mr. Trump offered to restore them to power, as though they have not been in power all along.

I need a major late pass on this one, but I finally, finally watched Blindspotting. Now I have serious post-semester regret for the ways it would have sat right in the groove with Angry Black White Boy, Long Division, and even Shadowshaper in my BreakBeat Lit seminar last fall - especially for the ways it attends to both hip-hop content and form. Or, add Sorry to Bother You, La Haine, and Do the Right Thing, and we’ve got a nice module on hip-hop film aesthetics.

Issue #29 of Elements and Embodiment, my regular newsletter, covers the collage art of Lorna Simpson and Visions Collage – plus what I’m reading, writing, and listening to this week.

Stripped and sanded my grandmother’s old bench with the intent of reapplying a dark stain. But hold up! Might just seal it and leave be.

Issue #28 of Elements & Embodiment went out today: From Russia with Buzz. It covers the fun story of 4625 kHz, a mysterous Russian shortwave radio frequency that nobody has ever claimed to run – in addition to what I’m reading, writing, listening to, and making.

Rethink Your Resources: The Origin Story of Derute tells how our worker cooperative around racial justice came to be. 📝

Giving my grandmother’s old bench some TLC. Knew I should have paid attention in shop class.

James Balwin’s letter to MLK in 1960.

Dear Reverend King:

I certainly do not expect you to remember it, but we met over two years ago, in Atlanta. I was then doing a couple of articles about the South, and I am in the South again, for the same purpose.

I am writing you now because Harpers Magazine has asked me to do a profile of you, and I am coming to Atlanta—I do not know whether you are there or not, but one must start somewhere—to see if this can be done. I know that you are extremely busy and my effort would be to bother you as little as possible. I have read your book, and Reddick’s book, so there are many things I will not need to ask you. If you will permit it, and if it is possible, I would simply like to be allowed to follow you about for a day or two, or longer, in order to be made able to convey some dim approximation of what it is like to be in your position.

The effect of your work, and I might almost indeed, say your presence, has spread far beyond the confines of Montgomery, as you must know. It can be felt, for example, right here in Tallahassee. And I am one of the millions, to be found all over the world but more especially here, in this sorely troubled country, who thank God for you.

I will be in your church on Sunday, and if you receive this letter, and if you are there, I trust we will be able to talk.

Very sincerely,

James Baldwin