Roxane Gay on the murder of Alton Sterling and America’s continued racist violence: “It’s overwhelming to see what we are up against, to live in a world where too many people have their fingers on the triggers of guns aimed directly at black people. I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know how to allow myself to feel grief and outrage while also thinking about change. I don’t know how to believe change is possible when there is so much evidence to the contrary. I don’t know how to feel that my life matters when there is so much evidence to the contrary.”
Jericho Brown’s poem “Bullet Points”: “I will not shoot myself / In the head, and I will not shoot myself / In the back, and I will not hang myself / With a trashbag, and if I do, / I promise you, I will not do it / In a police car while handcuffed / Or in the jail cell of a town / I only know the name of / Because I have to drive through it / To get home.”
Channing Beumer at Blavity with an open letter to white co-workers: “Today, I’m in an all-white work space. Everyone is cheerful and I am wearing a mask because all I want to do is scream. They don’t get it and they never will, and living that truth EVERY SINGLE DAY is exhausting.”
“It Doesn’t Feel Like a Time to Write,” a poem by Danez Smith: “i pray to everything / i’ve been taught to pray towards.”
Luke Darby on policing and the prison industrial complex in Louisiana: “Those problems are nothing new to anyone who’s read the Justice Department’s Ferguson investigation: The criminal-justice system is geared toward maintaining an economy built on arrests, convictions, and imprisonment. According to a 2012 exposé by The Times-Picayune, rural economies across the state are dependent on prison jobs and state funds they receive on a per-prisoner basis. The state pays $24.39 a day for each prisoner’s needs, and any leftover money goes to fund the local police departments.”
Lavish Reynolds, partner of Philando Castile and witness to his murder, speaks on a live FB feed here.
Jackie Wang’s Against Innocence: ““Ultimately, our appeals to innocence demarcate who is killable and rapable, even if we are trying to strategically use such appeals to protest violence committed against one of our comrades. […] When we rely on appeals to innocence, we foreclose a form of resistance that is outside the limits of law, and instead ally ourselves with the State.”
