Common Good Collective

Reader

This Reader is an expression of Common Good Collective, a vision for an alternative way, rooted in the act of eliminating economic isolation, the significance of place, and the structure of belonging. Whether you come at this from a place of economics, social good, or faith, we hope these reflections help orient your day in fresh, provocative, courageous ways. And most importantly, we hope these lead you into the sharing of gifts in particular communities—into co-creating a common good.

We read hundreds of articles and select the best ones for you by sending them to your inbox on Thursday.

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

Dear Sister Outsider

Belonging at its best is one asking “who’s missing at the table?” and another responding with confidence that they will be heard and believed. This was — and still is – Audre Lorde’s role. She boldly declared in rooms full of Black civil rights leaders and white feminists who was missing, and went further still to explain why. Let us belong together, all of us, and make our mark for the common good.

Dear Sister Outsider
by Lavelle Porter

Dear Audre,

Two years, ago your name came up in one of the most improbable places. A few weeks before the St. Louis Rams drafted Michael Sam, making him the first openly gay player in NFL history, a white male sportscaster in Texas named Dale Hansen gave a passionate response to Sam’s critics: “Civil rights activist Audre Lorde said, ‘It is not our differences that divide us, it is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.’” I never thought I’d see the day that a silver-haired, Southern white sportscaster with a Texas accent would publicly quote you, a black lesbian feminist socialist poet, and would do so in defense of a black gay professional football player, but here we are. Hansen’s full statement was powerful and drew attention. But the moment also made me wary. I thought about how this story of a gay athlete coming out in a major male sport was indicative of an assimilationist moment in queer politics. I wondered about your being reduced to an innocuous “civil rights activist” and not the militant poet who criticized the US invasion of your ancestral homeland Grenada, who spent time in the Soviet Union, and who might be critical of the macho, brutal sport that the young man plays or the billion-dollar corporation that runs it.

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

Change Begins With Imagination

The imagination “Want to change the world? There’s nothing to it,” sings Willy Wonka in the classic movie. Changing the world though, is not magic, but imagination. From the deep resources of historical imagination, to the wonders made possible in poetry, to those who dare to dream a new future, all our work begins with imagination.

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Poetry for Building Community, Reader, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

“Five Poems” by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison grabs gold and gems out of the air and turns them into words, and offers it all in service of describing…. an ordinary kiss. Or she reminds us, with only a hint, that tears leave evidence. She takes us to deep wilderness.

Five Poems
by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison stamped the very idea of a great American novel with her own brand of storytelling and on her own terms. I don’t know a writer or reader of any genre who isn’t mourning her today. She proved the power of her black characters and the value of their black lives through books loved by readers who do and do not have everything in common with those characters. She was also undeniable in her power as an essayist, and showed her respect for and influence by other genres with her plays (Dreaming Emmett and Desdemona) and her only published short story (“Recitatif”). Of course, she wrote poems. Her work in verse seems over and again to show us a woman facing death, and facing it with all the life she can. It’s as if she knows who she is and that, in that knowing, her declarations here will live forever.
—Jericho Brown, Poetry Editor

Eve Remembering

I tore from a limb fruit that had lost its green.
My hands were warmed by the heat of an apple
Fire red and humming.
I bit sweet power to the core.
How can I say what it was like?
The taste! The taste undid my eyes
And led me far from the gardens planted for a child
To wildernesses deeper than any master’s call.

Now these cool hands guide what they once caressed;
Lips forget what they have kissed.
My eyes now pool their light
Better the summit to see.

I would do it all over again:
Be the harbor and set the sail,
Loose the breeze and harness the gale,
Cherish the harvest of what I have been.
Better the summit to scale.
Better the summit to be.

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Reader, Structure Of Belonging, Wilderness: Sharing and Reorientation Permalink

Black Cops Don’t Make Policing Less Anti-Black

One of Bree Newsome Bass’s gifts is making connections. In our recent conversation with Bree, she helped make connections between policing, the commons, and private property. Bree’s analysis is relentless, looking into every crevice to root out the things that hurt. So is her imagination, which remains unbound and ready to create new ways of being that can create life.

Black Cops Don’t Make Policing Any Less Anti-Black
by Bree Newsome Bass

Amid recent growing calls for defunding police this summer, a set of billboards appeared in Dallas, Atlanta, and New York City. Each had the words “No Police, No Peace” printed in large, bold letters next to an image of a Black police officer. Funded by a conservative right-wing think tank, the billboards captured all the hallmarks of modern pro-policing propaganda. The jarring choice of language, a deliberate corruption of the protest chant “no justice, no peace,” follows a pattern we see frequently from proponents of the police state. Any word or phrase made popular by the modern movement is quickly co-opted and repurposed until it’s rendered virtually meaningless. But perhaps the most insidious aspect of modern pro-police propaganda is reflected in the choice to make the officer on the billboard the face of a Black man.

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

Who Owns The Earth?

Here’s a breath of fresh air: Preservation of the commons has not been completely forgotten. In contrast to the continual drive for profit, the commons – systems of common ownership of the most essential parts of our lives, especially land – have been returning to a few countries around the world. They rely on precisely what is needed to reduce economic isolation and restore our interdependence: rely on local knowledge, resist turning everything into profit, cultivate affection for places and people and plants and animals.

Who owns the earth?
by Antonia Malchik

My mother likes to say she was born out of the back of a ’39 Ford. She wasn’t, actually. She was born in a hospital in Chicago. But less than a year later she and her parents returned to the Montana ranch that her family had homesteaded in the early 1900s, and where they still lived. That is where my mother counts her birth, when she got out of the back of that ’39 Ford and came home to the prairie, full of meadowlarks and fragrant soil and a big golden willow. ‘I count how God and nature do things,’ she says of her birth. ‘People have a home, and they know when they get there.’

If there is a greater thrill of belonging, of home, than turning the key in your first house, it’s land ownership. The ranch my mother grew up on still smells of sweet soil. Its acres roll out under Montana’s big sky, harbouring the prairie’s native yellow bells and buttercups. To belong to a place like that, to know it’s yours to care for and live on, is a powerful and steadying force. On your own land, you can send out the kind of roots we often speak of but don’t always treat seriously. ‘I’ve put down roots,’ we say sadly when moving away from a place we’ve become attached to. Those roots are real, and they become stronger and deeper the more closely we belong to a place.

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