Category: rethink

Feelin’ Good: The Pleasure Practices of Black Folk   

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The American project necessarily dehumanizes Black people by reducing them to capital and capital-producers. This paper examines their pleasure practices including their romantic and familial relationships, their foodways, and children’s play as assertions of humanity and subversions of the identities constructed for them. DuBois says Black folks have a “double consciousness”—how they perceive themselves and how Whiteness constructs and interprets them. DuBois attends to the difficulties of progress; specifically the challenge of asserting selfhood under “the problem of the color line;” that is, the weight of Jim Crow. Yet even he admits “the rough world was softened by laughter and song”—pleasure practices. Riffing off of his interpretation of Black life in the The Souls of Black Folk this paper contends that pleasure practices necessarily mirror the “double consciousness” with liberatory affect. And that this softening is where progress and liberation happen.

To Tami

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"Like The Women in my family, The Women in yours probably had the same formula in mind when they were growing us. You and I were born in the same month of the same year, groomed and molded by similar forces: warm hands, church, rules, hip-hop. Had you been given the chance to grow up, you would’ve probably discovered, like I did, those forces barely compare to the ones that shapeshift Black girls like us into less generous images."

Relationship Goals: The Liberating Power of Intimacy in What We’ve Become

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So-called Black love...necessarily invents itself against the backdrop of legal and extra-legal exploitation of Black people that could reasonably disrupt intimacy except that Black people make choices... for Black people intimacy is not painless and is one of the most profound yet mundane aspects of our lives.

Bigger Than A Marathon

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So, yes, I want(ed) to race again. But this is bigger than running a marathon. One of the things that truly sucks about living with a so-called rare disease like sarcoidosis is you're invisible even in the spaces that are designed to help you. In clinical environments, you are a question mark. There are so many presentations, you could be suffering from anything...or nothing. In the world, you don't "look sick." In research environments you do not take precedence.

Can we talk?

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"Grape is the sweetest betrayal. There is no removing the stain of it say moms everywhere & even if kids choose it last, they choose it, as loyal to its sugar as any."

Who’s the Boss?

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As hard as it’s become to love my body through the challenge heart failure imposes on it (and if I’m honest before h.f.), I absolutely don’t not-love her. I do worry that she will up and leave me altogether. The truth is, our relationship will end because all bodies end. It’s no secret that all of them are fallible and impermanent despite the corporatizing of them that says we can make them otherwise.

Who’s Loving You

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We have a social contract in which our measuring stick for harm is familiarity and this contract puts us all at risk. Communities divest from perceived offenders (part of the premise of prisons) until and unless we perceive the offenders, not as offenders but as homies and relatives; dates or partners; familiars. Though they may have harmed or admitted to harming or being party to harm, to call them out is disruptive or shameful to the community unit, so we don’t name them offenders and absorb the harm, effectively normalizing it.

New Poems in Madcap Review!

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The cracks in my heart have not come from bodies offered in the guise of honey; haven’t shaken my hand seconds too long; taken my eyes for gazing balls; my limbs for casualwear. What pocks its surface could be mistaken for the debris their kind leave behind

What’s It Worth?

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It may be the teacher in me that believes my purpose is reinforced by my reach.

Look, I like a decent honorarium just like the next person. But if my value is wrapped up in that I feel like I'm missing the point and worse probably shortening my reach (and even worse: shortening it where it may be most critical).

Which One Doesn’t Belong

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So look, even if you could buy and sell them, since they don't know you from the one place they daily confront people who look like you with their wine, rice, and cilantro at the register, you are dismissed if you're lucky. If you're noticed it is with the disappointment that their come up has not been far enough up to escape the likes of your kind.