Tag: black lives matter

Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era

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Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era is an edited collection of critical essays and poetry that investigates contemporary elegy within the black diaspora. Scores of contemporary writers have turned to elegiac poetry and prose in order to militate against the white supremacist logic that has led to recent deaths of unarmed black men, women, and children. This volume combines scholarly and creative understandings of the elegy in order to discern how mourning feeds our political awareness in this dystopian time as writers attempt to see, hear, and say something in relation to the bodies of the dead as well as to living readers.

Comply or Die

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He explains that he understands compliance intimately by sharing this story: as younger men he and friends were stopped and robbed by police. Their choice, he suggests, to face the wall, hands up as told and accept the stick up, saved their lives.

Black Death and the What Ifs (is not a singing group)

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So what if the mission of those profiting from Black Death porn is to accomplish their stated mission: to remind The State (of mind) that Black and Brown lives should be recognized and treated as actual lives? What if The State (of mind) changed as a result of their activism? The Black Death porn market would be diminished, right? No demand so no need for a supply. No supply no profit. So another what if--what if Black Death porn proliferates in order to keep this market going?

2016 Espys

darlene anita scott4 Comments

When we gonna start naming black women whose bodies have been abused by a system that fails to see beyond the melanin that covers them (or maybe sees them and responds in kind--another argument for another day)?

Black Lives Matter: Death By Assimilation

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There are few, if any, choices a black body can make that do not speak its history, including the requisite traumas and proud triumphs over them. Under the gaze of the status quo, this body, with its history written all over it, is an indictment of the status quo. Erasing that physical body becomes critical to sustaining not just the aesthetic of the status quo but more importantly its structure. Erasure is not necessarily the literal murder of it, though that is one way to erase it, but more typically, the suppression of it. Suppression often comes in the form of assimilating the black body into the status quo.

Black Rage and the Invisible Black Body

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I am here to talk about silence. And the violence of it.  How it traumatizes the body that practices it as well as the bodies it is imposed upon. I want to talk about how it (silence, I mean)—and I made up this word—invisibilizes.  And how that act—to render someone, a body, invisible is violence. [...]

Boots on the Ground

darlene anita scott1 Comment

Some of y'all--well my twin and my mom mostly--have known the dark side of my last two professional years. When the profession gets out of the way of the work you get your magic.  But with the recent consumer-driven model of higher education that magic can fail as it gets flat and stale. Right now [...]