Common Good Collective

Reader, Significance Of Place, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

Memory, Land, and Fighting to Be Heard

While the news media has fixated on the words and actions of white families and GOP politicians regarding the very complex intellectual study known as Critical Race Theory, reporter Danya Hajjiji tells the stories of Black children, parents, and community members desperately trying to have their humanity and heritage honored by the places they call home.

Anti-Critical Race Theory Activists Are Drowning Out Black Parents Fighting School Racism
By Danya Hajjaji

When Tawiona Brown approached the lectern at a June Perrysburg Schools board meeting in Ohio, she brought along two blank pieces of paper. Her aim was to convey the experiences of her 17-year-old son Josiah “from a parent’s perspective.”

“‘Josiah, you like watermelon?'” she said, as she began crumpling one sheet of paper in her hands.

“‘You’re an n-word with a hard R.’

“‘Is the resource officer after you today, Josiah? I saw him following you around.'”

Still holding the wrinkled piece of paper, Brown then raised the other pristine sheet, an illustration of children’s “clean slate” when their parents send them to school.

“When your babies come home to you, mentally, this is what they should look like,” she said.

“Nice, even, smooth, nothing wrong. When my baby—and he’s a big boy, and I still call him my baby,” Brown continued, unfurling the wad of paper to reveal its creases. “When he comes home to me, mentally, this is what I have to clean up with my son.”

Creating Space for Our Children

Young people remind us that the world is filled with both promise and peril. We mold the families, and neighborhoods, and societies that we will leave to children. Have we created spaces where it is safe for our children to move around? What songs have we taught them to strengthen them in the face of the dangers they cannot avoid?

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Poetry for Building Community, Reader, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

“July 4, 1974”

Nothing prepares you for children, whether having your own, or having someone else’s child burst through your door on a visit, full of questions and vigor. And yet there they are, pulling us along, leading the way, and as June Jordan says here, “becoming light.”

July 4, 1974
By June Jordan

Washington, D.C.

At least it helps me to think about my son
a Leo/born to us
(Aries and Cancer) some
sixteen years ago
in St. John’s Hospital next to the Long Island
Railroad tracks
Atlantic Avenue/Brooklyn
New York

at dawn

which facts
do not really prepare you
(do they)

for him

angry
serious
and running through the darkness with his own

becoming light

June Jordan, “July 4, 1974” from Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by The June M. Jordan Literary Trust. Originally published online by the Poetry Foundation.

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Leaving Egypt and Pharaoh, Structure Of Belonging, Wilderness: Sharing and Reorientation Permalink

The True Impact of Collective Action

Last summer saw a wave of protest that sought systemic changes and confrontations with the country’s racist past. Did anything change? Is our trajectory still the same? Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor looks around and finds some halting progress – no perfect union, to be sure, but one filled with both promise and peril.

Did Last Summer’s Black Lives Matter Protests Change Anything?
By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

On June 1st last year, a week after George Floyd was murdered, more than three hundred fires blazed across Philadelphia, according to police. In the previous days, there had been reports of two hundred commercial burglaries—otherwise known as looting—and more than a hundred and fifty acts of vandalism. Four hundred people had been arrested, and the National Guard was on the way. By that Saturday, June 6th, tens of thousands of people clogged the streets of downtown, demanding justice, proclaiming that Black Lives Matter. For eight consecutive nights, the city was choked with tear gas, ruled by curfews. It wasn’t yet summer, but Philadelphia was on fire.

On the Heals of Foot Soldiers

LaTosha Brown is serious about the Black struggle for freedom. She has seen from history, and knows in herself, that passing on the culture that links together generations in that struggle is essential work for the movement.

On the Heals of Foot Soldiers
By Kelundra Smith

Food trucks line the street in front of Ebenezer Baptist Church on an especially humid June afternoon in Atlanta. Vendors sit under tents handing out snacks, masks, fans, and T-shirts. The Cash’s Juke Joint cover band has the crowd rocking to old school hits such as The Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” and “Before I Let Go” by Frankie Beverly and Maze. It’s a party atmosphere, but there’s also a sense of urgency.