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Reaching Beyond âBlack Faces in High Placesâ: An Interview With Joy James
Vice President Kamala Harris participates in a ceremonial swearing-in of Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building of the White House complex on January 27, 2021, in Washington, D.C.
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
With the advent of the Biden administration, itâs a crucial time to examine the role anti-Blackness plays not only when it comes to overt white supremacist actions, but also the actions of the government â and other forces of power â more broadly.
What does Black suffering look like historically? What is the complex relationship between âprogressiveâ racial politics and the subtle operations of capitalism? How is Black suffering monetized, especially within the context of celebrity activism? How do we ensure that our efforts to resist anti-Black racism are congruent with fighting on behalf of Indigenous peoples?
Joy James, “The New Abolitionists”
Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions. Ruth Wilson Gilmore June Jordan, “Sunflower Sonnet Number Two”
For those who are said to be and become nothing. Build nothing. Think nothing worth repeating or claiming as thought
as such, the commonplace assertion that poetry
makes nothing happen largely attributed, it bears mentioning, to W.H. Auden, himself a poet held in high esteem by more than one shining star within the Black aesthetic tradition simply doesn’t pass muster. Within various sectors of what Amiri Baraka and others have called “the black world,” and, on a much smaller cosmological scale, what we might think of herein as a constellation of sites, subsurface and elsewhere, operating under the general heading of Black America, poetry makes
Abolitionism is about more than dismantling prisons. It is also about building a world with universal access to safety, self-determination, freedom and dignity.