July 2010
33 posts
“The most remarkable situation is that of atheists who define themselves as ‘post-Christian.’ For the ‘post-Christian,’ Christianity is the last, the ultimate religion. After it, no other is possible, because it possesses to perfection whatever the others have, or ever could have. The only step from Christianity that would not be a regression is atheism. Atheism...
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Here’s the thing: I haven’t exchanged so much as a word with my father in nearly six years. But he is coming to my grandfather’s funeral, flying in and out of the same airport at the same time as I am. It’s that whole thing where obligations that are the result of death make certain convergences inevitable blah blah blah. I just am not jazzed at the prospect of seeing...
Jazmine Sullivan - Holding You Down
It takes a...
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My grandfather had a heart attack and two strokes last week. He passed away Thursday. One of the reasons that all of this is remarkable right now is because he was 95. Ninety-five. He was born in 1915! My mother and her siblings decided to take him off of the respirator on Saturday, a decision that, the doctor told them, meant that he would probably live for some time between five minutes and...
“[T]he most striking in his [Hegel’s] lectures…was the brutal thoroughness with which he dismissed all of sub-Saharan Africa, this ‘land of children,’ of ‘barbarity and wildness,’ from any significance for world history, due to what he deemed were deficiencies in the African spirit…
Haiti was once again in the news in the teens and twenties, hotly...
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Okay, so a nerd moment. There are three blurbs on the back of Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History that make it appear that the blurbers have not read the same book.
“Susan Buck-Morss provides a decisive reframing of Hegel in this wonderful book. The supposed idealist becomes a hard-headed realist whose concepts are formed while reading the morning newspapers. The idea...
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There can be no appeals made in the name of the laws of the country, of philanthropy, or humanity, or religion, that is capable of drawing forth anything but the retort,—you are a negro! If we call to our aid the thunder tones of the cannon and the arguments of fire arms, (vigorously managed by black and white men, side by side,) as displayed upon Dorchester Heights, and at Lexington, and at...
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The basic version is this: John Paulson is a wall street whiz and Hedge Fund owner. He went to Stern way back when and was inspired by (not making this up) a class lecture given by Robert Rubin to go into Wall Street. A couple of years ago, he picked a bunch of subprime mortgages, convinced Goldman Sachs to bundle them together and sell them to investers, and then bet against them. He then made...
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I haven’t posted much of late, so here’s a quick tidbit that I’ve been thinking about since seeing Inception this past weekend.
I went to college, briefly, with Joseph Gordon Levitt. I only saw him twice, but when I met him I did not recognize him as the kid from Third Rock from the Sun or Ten Things I Hate About You. Why? Because I’m terrible with faces and he had cut...
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The question for me is not, however, what have academic feminists been doing to allow things to go so terribly wrong. We are not, “academic feminism” is not the solo referent for feminism as a political discourse and world building force, nor is social transformation as an historical process synonymous with social movement, strategies, and goals. My argument for a distinction between...
Though I sense the danger in looking at stories and novels as depositories for the experience of slavery (its transmutation into remarkable “histories” for the readers’ delectation), I suspect that domination and servitude worked reciprocally for those who lived with the terrors of the “peculiar institution.” They, too, transported these terms, the facts of life in...
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“I might have feelings about justice, for example I feel that the killing of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer was unjust; and that the verdict in the case (involuntary manslaughter) is also unjust. But justice is not a register that I trade in as a theorist. And perhaps not even as a politico. I am interested in ethics, which is to say that I am interested in explaining relations of...
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lovealesia:
“Fear” is the common defense for officers who abuse the state-sanctioned right to brandish lethal force, excusing everything from the killing of Amadou Diallo to pulling a gun in the middle of a snowball fight. The question, however, remains: If you scare this easy, why are you a cop?
(via Ta-Nehesi Coates)
The law is funny this way, and since we know something about...
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CR Statement on Policing
Policing is the practice, empowered by the state, of enforcing law and social control through the use of force. The roots of policing in the United States are closely linked to slavery, the capture of escaped slaves, and the enforcement of Black Codes and Jim Crow. Police forces were also routinely used to keep new immigrants “in line” and to prevent the...
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sweating the technique
Tomorrow’s my last day in New York. What a few weeks it’s been. There’ll be a lot to share when I get back to the Bay, but I dunno? Again, to raise the specter of general crisis about what this blog is about, and being neurotically preoccupied as I tend to be with the concern that it’s veering too much toward a shade of the personal that is not also the political, who...
“I always thank God for making me a man simply, but [Martin] Delany always thanks Him for making him a black man.”
- Frederick Douglass
There is a psychological phenomenon that consists in the belief that the world will open to the extent to which frontiers are broken down.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
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WatchJanelle Monáe feat. B.O.B. and Lupe Fiasco - TIghtrope (Remix)
Via my younger sister. I love it when she scoops me on things. Yeah, it’s Thursday, not MonDáe. Sue me.
Children are dying in Chicago. The young and old are afraid to walk the streets of some neighborhoods. Gangs and drugs have overtaken many blocks. Armed young men shoot at police officers and innocent bystanders alike. Mothers and ministers are organizing antiviolence campaigns. Social workers, probation officers, and juvenile delinquency experts are working together to stop the bloodshed and...