The weight of our impact and the pressures it brings are familiar to me. So I hold Professor Davis in so much love and light. I hope she is being well supported. I hope we all are, in the quiet work that happens outside performance reviews and tenure packets; as we hope it will not be us but quietly accept the possibility and responsibility.
So let me try this: I wanted just to say that I homed your fuckshit in my belly so long that I have fertilized a field and they are some of the most vibrant colors. They could be weeds. And facts: even weeds are useful sometimes.
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.
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.
So there we were living our happily ever after when our communication kept getting interrupted. The signal was poor. Eventually our conversations were curt and stilted—we probably secretly blamed each other for the poor signal. Turns out we were both wrong. (As far as doctors have so far surmised. This is idiopathic—without known cause).
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.
The training, racing, and creative process...is a triumph over the physical and psychic conditions just outside the parameters of control which would censor and stilt performance.
So we had a Title IX briefing. My ears were weary; my soul hurt; and my brain nearly exploded. But before it did I recorded these to share with my colleagues sometime after I meet the Wizard and get myself some courage: Pro-tip 1: Transgender, homosexual, non-binary, bisexual--none of these are synonyms for pedophile or [...]
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)?
Rape culture is NOT gendered. We make a mistake of unwittingly participating in the victimization of those who are also, or are in danger of being, affected and moreover abused by it when we don’t acknowledge that.
darlene anita scott 