Common Good Collective

Poetry for Building Community, Reader, Significance Of Place Permalink

“2008, XII”

Wendell Berry leaves a striking thought in this poem: a life of remembering well, of choosing life and freedom in the places we inhabit, is a life none of us have yet lived. We make offerings to gods too small. We bless what will finally destroy the soil that nourishes us. And yet, the idea that we might become free persists.

2008, XII
Wendell Berry

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge…Hosea 4:6

We forget the land we stand on
and live from. We set ourselves
free in an economy founded
on nothing, on greed verified
by fantasy, on which we entirely
depend. We depend on fire
that consumes the world without
lighting it. To this dark blaze
driving the inert metal
of our most high desire
we offer our land as fuel,
thus offering ourselves at last
to be burned. This is our riddle
to which the answer is a life
that none of us has lived.

This poem was published on Poets.org

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Imagination: The Prophetic Act of Living an Alternative Narrative, Reader, Significance Of Place, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

Why Confederate Lies Live On

Poet and writer Clint Smith III has been thinking about the significance of place, and about how the places humans create help us to remember, and also to forget. Places can help us learn the truths that will set us free, or they can reinforce the lies that ensnare communities into narratives that cannot give life. This excerpt from his new book How the Word is Passed offers a glimpse into the places where he has been meditating on the truths that lead to freedom.

Why Confederate Lies Live On
By Clint Smith

Most of the people who come to Blandford Cemetery, in Petersburg, Virginia, come for the windows—masterpieces of Tiffany glass in the cemetery’s deconsecrated church. One morning before the pandemic, I took a tour of the church along with two other visitors and our tour guide, Ken. When my eyes adjusted to the hazy darkness inside, I could see that in each window stood a saint, surrounded by dazzling bursts of blues and greens and violets. Below these explosions of color were words that I couldn’t quite make out. I stepped closer to one of the windows, and the language became clearer. Beneath the saint was an inscription honoring the men “who died for the Confederacy.”

Outside, lawn mowers buzzed as Black men steered them between tombstones draped in Confederate flags. The oldest marked grave at Blandford dates back to 1702; new funerals are held there every week. Within the cemetery’s 150 acres are the bodies of roughly 30,000 Confederate soldiers, one of the largest mass graves of Confederate servicemen in the country.

Beyond Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street”

Over the past several weeks, many publications have printed work about remembering the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. This interview with historian Robin DG Kelley has blown us away. In it, Dr. Kelley makes plain how the language around our collective remembering helps to maintain a hierarchy of relations in terms of race and class. To restore places like the Greenwood District of Tulsa, we will need a much fuller accounting – not only of who was there and what was lost, but also of how our remembering and our forgetting have obscured the path forward to a more just future.

The Tulsa Race Massacre Went Way Beyond “Black Wall Street”
by Robin D.G. Kelley

George Yancy George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth College. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020 academic year). He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 20 books, including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, A White; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America; and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. More by this author…

Published June 1, 2021

There is so much grieving that Black people have yet to do. The grammar of our suffering from anti-Black racism has yet to be fully created.

As we currently deal with the pervasiveness of Black suffering, mourning and grief related to anti-Black racism, there has been a great deal of media coverage acknowledging that this year marks 100 years since the Tulsa Race Massacre, where roughly 300 people — predominantly Black people — were killed; Black churches, schools and businesses were burned to the ground, and the homes of Black people were looted. Yet, it is still not clear to me that white America is ready to acknowledge how Black people have suffered and continue to suffer under systemic white racism.

In this moment of collective remembrance of the Tulsa Race Massacre, I asked the brilliant scholar Robin D. G. Kelley to provide his reflections. Kelley offers a deep analysis that provides a counternarrative (a powerful X-ray) of the massacre that allows us to see deep issues embedded within racial capitalism that impacted poor working-class Black people and sustained Indigenous suffering.

Setting the Record Straight

Stories are powerful. They help us connect to our neighbors, to our history, and to ourselves. They also have the power to do the opposite — creating confusion, anger, and hate. In this week’s Common Good Reader, we read dozens of pieces to find compelling content that seeks to set the record straight about who we are and where we come from.

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Eliminating economic isolation, Possibly: Freedom for A New Story, Reader Permalink

Black Wall Street’s Second Destruction

There are many stories told to us that place a period where there is, in fact, a comma. Carlos Moreno’s article answers an important question, “What happened to Greenwood after the massacre?” His answer frees us to contemplate the machinations of economic isolation.

Black Wall Street’s Second Destruction
by Carlos Moreno

The Tulsa Daily World’s June 2, 1921 morning edition headline read: “Dead Estimated at 100: City is Quiet. $2000 to Start Fund for Relief. Negros Gladly Accept Guards. 5,000 Negro Refugees Guarded in Camp at County Fairgrounds.”

Fewer than 24 hours after Ku Klux Klan leaders — along with the Tulsa Police Department and the Oklahoma National Guard — carried out the nation’s deadliest and most destructive massacre, Tulsa’s paper of record was already at work crafting a narrative that would shape the way that the city would think about the massacre in Greenwood for the next 100 years.