And then Anica showed out with ackee and saltfish. God bless this sabbatical of hers.

Who are the other newsletter writers on Microblog? Or, what newsletters do you subscribe to, and why? I appreciate a good newsletter and want to subscribe to more of them.

I took a break from my weekly newsletter, but it made a comeback this week – esp. because I was reading all the MF DOOM tribute pieces and wanted to connect some dots. So here is issue 037 of Elements & Embodiment that went out on Monday.

I see people drawing parallels between the 1/6 Capitol insurrection and the white supremacist coup of 1898 in Wilmington, NC. That’s appropriate. But I’m sitting most with what the descendants of those insurrectionists will think of their white ancestors. Here’s what I mean.

In 2018, historian and journalist David Zucchino visited the grandson of a ruthless white supremacist who played central role in the 1898 Wilmington Massacre. The white supremacist was Josephus Daniels. Daniels ran the News & Observer, the largest newspaper in North Carolina. But he did more than run it. He crafted the paper into an anti-Black, white supremacist propaganda engine — a surefire precursor to Fox News. He called time and time again for the violent destruction of Black leaders, Black people, Black businesses, and Black institutions in Wilmington. White supremacists answered that call on Thursday, November 10, 1898.

But back to the grandson. Over a century after the massacre, and sixty years after Daniels’s death, Zucchino met with that grandson, Frank A. Daniels, Jr. They met downtown Wilmington, NC. Zucchino tells this story in the final pages of Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. Zucchino’s mind must have been some place close to where mine is right now. He wanted to know how the grandson made sense of his grandfather and the role he played in the insurrection/coup/massacre, among other things. The state of North Carolina avoided any formal investigation into this coup for a century. When it finally formed a commission to investigate, its report criticized Daniels’s grandfather for his “racial incitements and demagoguery.” The report was correct. At that meeting downtown Wilmington, Zucchino asked grandson Daniels if he agreed with the report’s conclusions about his grandfather. Daniels told him this:

“I never read it.”

So again: what I’m sitting with is how the descendants of those insurrectionists will think of their white (and otherwise) ancestors.

I see people drawing parallels between the 1/6 Capitol insurrection and the white supremacist coup of 1898 in Wilmington, NC. This has me thinking about descendants. I need to flesh this out a bit.

I usually give a pre-class survey for students to fill out sometime before our first class session. It lets me know a bit about what I’m walking into and what adjustments/supports might be necessary. Here are some of the sentence starters/questions I am using this semester.

*For this class, one thing I’m excited about is…

*For this class, one thing I’m worried about is…

*In order for me to be successful in this class this semester, I will need…

*Some questions I have right now are….

*Is there anything else you need to share with me to start off the year?

Reading: I recently finished the one masterful novel unfit for reading during a pandemic: José Saramago’s Blindness. I say “unfit” because it follows a group of unnamed people through an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness that has afflicted the world. I had been saving the novel for a while and couldn’t put off reading it any longer. As it would be, I finished the last page on the last day of 2020. Perhaps that will be in some way symbolic.

Writing: We are in the home stretch of an article that theorizes the spaces in which teachers and teacher activists self organize. I came in a bit late to this article with my writing partners, but I’m happy that Carol Levine’s ideas on forms that I brought with have come to lead the way conceptually. Levine’s book made quite a splash when it came out in 2015, and the praise is all deserved. You can find a few reviews and commentaries of it on my pinboard here

Teaching: This semester I’m teaching a course on reading and teaching young adult literature through anti-racist and anti-oppressive approaches. We start this week with the very excellent Letting Go of Literary Whiteness by Carlin Borsheim-Black and Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides. You can check out the course description and learning objectives on this post if you like.

Listening: DOOM. Like so many others, I’m revisiting his catalog on account of his sudden passing.

Viewing: I’m a late watcher by habit. So in typical fashion, I finally watched The Mandalorian. Both seasons, back to back, all the way through. Serious binge. Big pop on the final scene.

The floorplan is coming together for my young adult lit + anti-racist teaching course. Here is where we stand, with some last minute tweaks likely to happen before Monday.

Course focus:

This class focuses on reading and teaching young adult literature through anti-racist and anti-oppressive approaches. Since many contemporary applications of these approaches are made by current teachers, the course also connects your learning to the efforts current teacher activists are taking toward more liberating classrooms and curricula. Reading demand: high! Writing demand: low!

Learning objectives:

• Know and be able to use accurate critical race concepts while analyzing and discussing literature  
• Design and facilitate critical race discussions about literature
• Gain comfort/affective stamina analyzing and discussing anti-Blackness, racism, whiteness, etc. in literature 
• Analyze characteristics of young adult literature and reimagine what counts in the genre
• Evaluate young adult literature as an effective and creative tool capturing contemporary moments/realities
• Connect with English teachers who are teaching and developing anti-oppressive curriculum around young adult literature 

Two adjectives I’m trying to strike from my writing: “traditonal” and (then what I often use instead) “formal.” There might be magic if you get rid of them.

From “The Mask of DOOM: A Noncomformist Rapper’s Second Act” (2009) >He paused to explain his approach. “When I’m doing a DOOM record, I’m arranging it, I’m finding the voices… . All I have to do is listen to it and think, Oh shit, that will be funny. I write down whatever would be funny, and get as many ‘whatever would’ funnies in a row and find a way to make them all fit. There’s a certain science to it. In a relatively small period of time, you want it to be, That’s funny, that’s funny, that’s funny, that’s funny. I liken it to comedy standup.”

Mos Def praised DOOM: “He rhymes as weird as I feel.” I love that. 🎵