They’re all saying what we have to do is fight for our democracy. They tell us if we don’t rally behind the politician who spent decades legislating mass incarceration for Black people & is culminating his career in a presidency responsible for many of the greatest atrocities our century has seen yet in the genocide of Palestinians, we cannot save our democracy because it will be doomed to an autocrat. We watch white supremacists threaten literacy all across the south now, banning books, defunding institutions and programs, at rapid speed because this is the depth to which their hatred of Black people reaches. We see politicians of both parties agree that even though people have cried for police to stop killing, the solution to the free existence of Black people is increased funding and militarization of police. We also see that throughout its history the empire of the United States has claimed that the reason it ravaged other countries with war crimes and usurped their autonomous right to govern was that it was bringing democracy to them. I want to take a strange turn in this moment as we are considering what the fate of the high ideal of democracy is, and just offer that we have never achieved this. I want to remind us that the concept of democracy the white slaveholders who founded America adapted from the Greeks always required many human beings to be excluded from the category of citizen to operate. The demos of the Greek city states did not include women, or anyone who didn’t own property including that society’s slaves. Black people have not enjoyed legal citizenship for the majority of our country’s history. Women did not receive the right to vote in America until a couple decades into the twentieth century. Whatever we want for our world we need to never be too allied to the ideological concepts the establishment of the powerful has reified for us and we need to make use of them, and whatever else we have, to work towards something that’s actually working for everyone. Which is far from what we have.
Ever patching together survival I continue investing in the practice of reading to anchor me and help me engage what it means to exist as a human being in this realm of sorrow that is the world we were given. I’ve been setting about reading a collected essays of Ralph Ellison to round myself out for my education, and I made note of his opening to the essay “Harlem Is Nowhere,” because he opens with his visit to an integrated psychiatric hospital in Harlem. In 1948 when this essay was written many psychiatric facilities were segregated, and you guessed it, the greatest neglect and torture was reserved for the patients in Black psychiatric facilities. This was a happier tale than you’d expect of a psychiatric facility in the 1940s because Ellison praised the institution’s attempt to see Black patients as real people and to offer them culturally informed care. Of course I always envision myself among these patients as a mad person. I’ve also begun Helen Oyeyemi’s PARASOL AGAINST THE AXE. Though she’s widely considered a British writer her birth in Nigeria is what led me to squeeze in qualifying her for my endeavor to be always reading an African writer. I like the book so far. It takes place in Prague which is quite a scenic locale to travel to. This writer is one of my favorites for her inventiveness. Every Black writer who is able to be experimental and daring in fiction and see a way made for them to a have a wide audience is an inspiration to me as someone fighting so very hard on my journey to have my work heard. Leaving you all for now, it’s funny because Curtis Mayfield just came on my music shuffle as I’m writing this. He told me to “Keep on Pushing.” I will, and I recommend that to all of you.
Wisdomfire!!!!