Become A Good Ancestor with Layla Saad
Ep002: This Here Flesh with Cole Arthur Riley

The Black history I carry with me: Cole Arthur Riley
By Jeneé Osterheldt

This column is a part of A BEAUTIFUL RESISTANCE: Black joy, Black lives, as celebrated by culture columnist Jeneé Osterheldt

Cole Arthur Riley created a literary communion in Black Liturgies.

On Instagram, she’s made a space to lift her innermost thoughts as well as the holy wisdom of our writing legends like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and the Bible, too.

“When I’m most honest, I tell people that Black Liturgies was born out of anger. I began the project in the wake of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, and the resurfacing of the murders of Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain,” says Riley, the spiritual teacher in residence with Cornell University’s Office of Spirituality and Meaning Making.

“I was hungry for a spiritual space where Black grief, Black anger, my Black body was honored in a meaningful way. I had belonged to white-dominated, Christian spaces for long enough that I was desperate for a community of spiritual liberation. So I began connecting Black literature and poems, sometimes with prayers, sometimes with a breath practice. And very quickly a community much larger than I had an imagination for began to form,” she says.

Having drawn in a “congregation” of over 140,000 followers in a year and a half, Riley is releasing her debut novel, “THIS HERE FLESH,” published by Penguin Random House later this month. Get to know her.

The Black History I carry with me is:

Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Zora Neale Hurston. All the Black women who’ve understood what their words were worth, particularly in times when the world was trying to convince them otherwise.

I sometimes walk around with the first line of Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters in my head. It gets stuck in there like a song, and I’ll find myself kind of chanting, “Are you sure sweetheart, that you want to be well?” It has made a home in me. There is a magical canon of Black women authors who’ve expanded our imaginations for liberation, who’ve articulated nuanced Black characters with quirks and flaws and beauties. If I could write a sentence even a fraction as tender and complicated as theirs, I would feel proud.

Why is it so important for us to author our own stories and share them?

When I wrote THIS HERE FLESH, I didn’t immediately know it would be a book of storytelling. I thought it was just going to be this serious book of philosophical contemplation or something. But when I picked up the pen, all I was capable of writing were the stories that had formed me. I couldn’t talk about dignity without talking about my father lathering cocoa butter on us in the evenings. I couldn’t speak of lament, without telling of my gramma lying, trembling, on the linoleum floor. We must tell our own stories, because so many stories have been stolen from us. So many of us have not been allowed to tell the truth of us with the passion it demands, or without being censored and rewritten. We must become our own historians.

It was Toni Morrison who said, “Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald … But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.”

So there is also something really powerful in knowing that as we share our stories, it doesn’t always need to be so literal and succinct. As I wrote THIS HERE FLESH, I kept reminding myself that I was free at last to unshackle my creativity. So you’ll find a bit of magic and myth in the book. Myth sadly can have a negative connotation; I’d like to reclaim this. It’s a beautiful and worthy form for our storytelling. The ancestors have shown us that much.

What gives you joy?

I’ve always loved being alone. A few years ago I would’ve felt too much shame to answer this question with “solitude,” but I’m learning to resist this. I rest best when I’m alone– when I’m not engulfed in the emotions or experiences of others. For some of us, solitude possesses a rare path into our interior worlds. And I feel so at peace, so alive with joy when I travel into myself. To remember who I am and all that has made me. It risks sounding self absorbed, but the reality is, my solitude often takes me into memories and stories of people that have passed on. And it also makes me more attuned to the interior lives of others. It makes me a better friend, a better daughter. Solitude is, maybe in paradox, a practice of collective care.

So I write and I stare at the wall and I watch Netflix documentaries and water the plants. And I’m alone, but there’s joy there.

My life is a beautiful resistance because:

I refuse to live a disembodied life. Even as I survive the violence of white supremacy, the judgment of white intellectualism, the pain of a body that is chronically ill, the memory of a body that has endured abuse, I refuse to abandon my body. It contains more beauty, more mystery than I am able to articulate. And in befriending and honoring it, I communicate belief in my inherent dignity.

Follow @blackliturgies and learn more at colearthurriley.com. This column was originally published by the Boston Globe.

To change the future of work for the better, let’s prioritize people-first, not tech-first, businesses.
By Sherrell Dorsey

In my hometown of Seattle, at the age of 14, I stepped onto the Microsoft campus for my first internship feeling like a big shot. My experience within this epicenter of tech innovation was a significant step in my career journey, but it was not the launching pad for my future in the workforce.

Before I built my chops on Bill Gates’ turf, I’d learned the world of work through Monica McAffee. “Auntie Monica,” as we called her, had been my mom’s nail technician since I was five years old. By the time I’d become a teenager, I’d mastered the art of styling my own hair in between visits to the salon. One day, observing my technical talent for tresses, Auntie Monica invited me onto her team to assist her with styling clients in the shop a few hours a week.

The shop was a masterclass in business and developing a supportive workplace culture. Auntie Monica was precise. She’d run her business for over 25 years, with clients who grew up with her. She served church folk, regular people, Black women of all backgrounds, shapes, sizes, and styles. Some were grandmothers. Moms. Wives. Sisters. Cousins. All were like family to her.

Auntie Monica saw them grow up. She nurtured them, and often fed them when Uncle Kev, her husband and business partner, would fry chicken after a long week and serve up guests when appointments would seep into the late evening.

Auntie Monica represented fullness in entrepreneurship. She ran a business that enabled her own personal wealth journey, which consisted of a hefty real estate portfolio and a well-traveled life—on her terms. For me, she set a standard for hard work, relationship development, company culture, customer service and financial intelligence. This valuable incubation, which was skipped over by leaders who downplayed the genius on our side of town, is at the core of my audacious dream for the future of work.

Imagine for a second if startups were understood to be more than just what occurs in a garage, dorm room, kitchen table, or tech conference—but also what builds a community, wherever that may be. Consider what would happen if we didn’t only focus our attention and investment in what is high growth and high tech, but also paid attention to the microcosms of communities that are people-first versus tech-first: the daycares, coffee shops, bakeries, plumbing services, and more. What would our cities look like in that case?

I’ll tell you.

We would see widespread development. Inner cities and lower-income or disadvantaged communities, for the first time in history, would be deemed hubs for innovation instead of urban problems. The creators and trailblazers who live in these underserved hotspots would no longer be neglected.

Imagine for a second if startups were seen to be more than just what occurs in a garage, dorm room or tech conference—but also what builds a community, wherever that may be.

Black women entrepreneurs who, like Auntie Monica, are skilled in effectively incubating young Black entrepreneurs would be recognized as the training institutions that they are for the future of work. Thus, the nature of the service and vocational industries become centers of empowerment, job training, economic mobility and community stability during a time where the sector at large is experiencing high turnover.

This would hold especially true in the service industry, where Black women are overrepresented. In 2021, 25% of Black women workers worked in service occupations, compared with just 18% of white women workers and 12% of white men. As a result, if nothing else, we must direct our focus in that direction.

I imagine a city concerned with inclusive innovation and job growth as one that undoubtedly intends to provide Black women-owned service businesses with the utmost support they deserve. At the surface, this support means funding them to become accelerators to small business growth and providing resources for them to offer paid internship programs for locals.

A 2021 census report found that businesses owned and operated by people of color tend to employ people within their own communities. And yet, these aren’t the business owners often considered to be launching pads for educating and training the future of the workforce. Reshaping a city to be conscious of this would yield a significant impact on the local service industry.

When Black women are let down and left out of the growth equation, cities lose a valuable source of economic and social capital.

Now, the urge to argue that service occupations are a source of automation risk, particularly for the African-American workforce, is understandable. But I would counter that notion by presenting this as an opportunity to invest in training. Progressive cities must consider taking steps toward up-skilling and retraining Black-owned service-sector businesses for positions that can’t yet be claimed by automation.

According to a 2017 McKinsey Global Institute analysis, Black service-industry workers have access to fewer economic resources to address their potential displacement on their own, so it will take collaboration across the private, public and social sectors to promote retraining opportunities for African Americans. I’d like to see us do it, changing our approach and making an effort to build forward-thinking communities, even in the inner cities. By dismissing opportunities like this all around us, we have consistently squandered possibilities to be revolutionary in our communities.

Take a snapshot of any city in the United States today, and please, zoom in. You’ll notice that much more can be done to drastically improve the livability for Black women and to prioritize them in the work landscape of the future. From the west coast to the east, I’ve spent years living and working across the country, and the root of the disappointment is the same: a lack of support and accessibility.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, I worked alongside Black women who fought tooth and nail to no avail for their voices to be heard, the value of their work understood, and adequate resources put in their reach.

Illustrated by Steffi Walthall for Bloomberg Magazine

It’s obvious that when Black women are let down and left out of the growth equation, cities lose a valuable source of economic and social capital. So why not reshape a city designed to work for them rather than against them in every way possible? For the workforce that extends beyond the workplace, let us also rethink how we structure coworking spaces.

My best friend and business partner of over 10 years, Enovia Bedford, enrolled her son in a school with a coworking space on campus. She is able to run her remote business in close proximity to her son during work and school hours. What a lovely sight! He is taken care of, while she handles what she needs to in order to provide for their family.

Consider reshaping a city with more setups like this. Rather than jumping through hurdles of discrimination and facing the psychological warfare of male-centered corporate systems, Black mothers who want to focus on growing businesses and creating their own income can do so without jeopardizing their availability for their children.

The worth of Black women’s contributions to building communities is not exclusively measured in terms of their output. With education and careers being the focus for many policymakers, it can be easy to forget about the minds and bodies behind those institutions. Wellness amenities, as of now, are a luxury for many, mainly located in places where white folks raise their families.

I would like to reimagine such environments and centers as a requirement for health and productivity in spaces where Black women live. Dare to provide neighborhoods populated by Black families with top-tier therapeutic services, a comprehensive spectrum of maternal care, nutrition and exercise, and fill every corner with green space. Through the collaborative effort of public and private partnerships, we can create safe, culturally rich environments that prioritize services for physical and mental health.

This future I speak of may take time and directed investments to realize, but it is not out of reach if we can agree on where the movement must begin—at the top. The lack of representation at higher levels of business and government pervades our cities, resulting in the disproportionate work landscape we see locally.

Through it all, the Black woman has been an underrated pioneer, an overlooked incubator, an interrupted power, and—far too often—a missed opportunity for investment. It is past time to reevaluate our priorities and reimagine the destinies of our cities to say no more.

This excerpt was originally published by Bloomberg Magazine with permission from the publisher, Wiley, from Upper Hand: The Future of Work for the Rest of Us. by Sherrell Dorsey. Copyright © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. All rights reserved. Dorsey is also the founder and chief executive officer of The Plug-a news platform covering the Black innovation economy and available on the Bloomberg Terminal.

Editors: Brentin Mock, Jennifer Sondag
With assistance from Kelsey Butler and Jordyn Holman

New Motherhood, a Dictionary
By Namrata Poddar

Motherhood: Goddess squad gracing the walls of Hindu temples, wifehood and motherhood balanced perfectly in those slender waists and big breasts, ever ready to nurse.

Motherhood of the Goddess Consort, a male fantasy like their Virgin Mother.

Motherhood: a border, a wall sundering your life into prebaby and post-baby days. Wait till he grows up, they say. It comes back—the physical mobility, the energy, the yoga, the reading, brunches with girlfriends, happy hour with colleagues, the love-making too.

Motherhood: your new role—now  that you’ve given them a legacy with a baby boy—as an addendum in their parties, neither the text you’ve aspired to be nor the footnote you used to be.

Motherhood: its own game of power in heterodomesticity, one you keep fighting for dignity, one you keep losing for sanity.

Motherhood: shield for your baby boy from the silence and self-hatred of those mother figures, wired to perpetuate toxic masculinity.

Motherhood: quarantine before quarantine becomes a global thing, worthy of empathy.

Motherhood: a feminine logic of love. How it strips romantic love of its luster, that transactional love between adults driven by a capitalist logic of profit.

Motherhood: an unending play of paradox, a dance in chiaroscuro.

Motherhood: Adi Shakti, primordial Goddess Mother, Creatrix to all that was, is, will be. How she empties you of the masculine drive to possess meaning. How she anchors you into the fleeting, into what is yet to be born. Your alignment with eternal becoming.

This piece was originally published by Raising Mothers.

Nurturing a Narrative
By Courtney Napier

What would you do if you held a link to the humanity of a near-mythical figure in history? Through a serendipitous series of circumstances, Victoria Scott-Miller came to possess such a treasure, and it set the course for her future in an unexpected way.

Hailing from Memphis, Tennessee, the Scott family lived a life surrounded by art and beauty. Father Victor Scott was a freelance photographer, plugged in to the opulent lifestyle of famous friends like Lena Horne and Al Jarreau. These relationships were exciting, but also opened him up to the world of drugs. By 1986, he and his wife, Pamela, had just celebrated their daughter Victoria’s first birthday and were expecting their second daughter, Jessica. If they were going to survive as a family, they had to make a drastic change. They left behind the life they knew and moved to Philadelphia to begin the road to recovery.

During a rummage trip to the basement of their new home, Victor Scott found a Bible trimmed in gold. His wife noticed right away that it was special. She pleaded with her husband not to pawn the book to satisfy his addiction, but after realizing that this was a losing battle, she insisted on at least keeping the thick stack of papers tucked inside.

The years passed. Victor Scott overcame his addiction, but the couple divorced in the 1990s. Pamela Scott had the papers examined by Sotheby’s—they were indeed valuable, appraised at $50,000—but even though she was by then a single mother and needed the money more than ever, she declined their offer. Her intuition said that this possession was more significant than money. When Victor Scott passed in 2017, Pamela Scott finally gave the papers to her eldest daughter, Victoria Scott-Miller.

A detailed look at the letters belonging to Victoria Scott-Miller. Photos by Eamon Queeney

Scott-Miller immediately went to work to untangle their origin story. The handwritten notes, she soon discovered, were an exchange between legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Nathanial Knight, a white bookstore owner and justice of the peace. As described in his biography, Douglass met Knight in his Baltimore bookstore, Greedy Reid’s, at just 14 years old. Defying the law, it was there that Douglass purchased his first book, the Columbian Orator, which had a major impact on the trajectory of Douglass’s life.

In January of 2019, the Miller family was contacted by a prestigious historian, who offered them $2 million for the papers. All they had to do was agree to a non-disclosure agreement concerning her family’s role in the discovery of the letters, allowing the origin story to begin with him and his institution.

The money was tempting. Scott-Miller and her husband, Duane Miller, had just relocated to Raleigh. Miller had been medically discharged from the military, and Scott-Miller had left a teaching position to care for their boys. They were on food stamps, just making ends meet.

Then she had a conversation with John Muller, a Baltimore historian and friend of the Douglass family. “It was as if he delivered a message from our past,” says Scott-Miller. “He said, ‘If you sell these papers, you will no longer be part of this story.’”

She declined the offer with a new thought: “How can we safeguard our legacy the way that my mom did for us?”

Scott-Miller’s son, Langston, had just started writing his own stories. So the Millers went to a bookstore and played a game: count the number of children’s books with Black protagonists on display, extra points if the author is also Black. After over an hour, they counted just five books. At that moment, the vision clarified.

“We thought about what it would look like to have a space that provided books with characters that looked like our children,” says Scott-Miller. “Then we thought about what it would look like if we provided that space.”

Scott-Miller had just received a gift of $250 from her mother to help make ends meet. She decided to use $225 to buy her first round of children’s books that featured Black authors and characters, and the remaining $25 fed her family for the week. Scott-Miller hosted her first pop-up bookshop on May 3 of last year, and Liberation Station was born.

Having a mobile store was a key part of the vision. The Miller family was familiar with moving around in the military, and they also understood that—due to forces like gentrification—neighborhoods of color are constantly changing. “We could set up a bookstore somewhere right now, and that would be great,” she says, “but what about the kids who are displaced and homeless across our city? Why can’t the bookstore be in their hotel room? We have to think about accessibility.”

In just a year, Liberation Station has seen astronomical success. They began a fruitful relationship with VAE Raleigh in August, when the pop-up bookstore earned their Awesome Grant for their Walk & Read program, which hosted storytime gatherings in Chavis Park and Pullen Park. They hosted storytime at SparkCon, and book readings and signings with local authors of color during VAE’s Writing On The Wall celebration. To kick off 2020, Liberation Station hosted a pop-up for the release of My N.C. from A to Z, a children’s book by Michelle Lainer, executive director of the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, illustrated by Dare Coulter.

This year, Liberation Station will have programs across the state, including developing culturally sensitive programming for several public schools in Wake County and a creative collaboration with the African American Cultural Festival.

Although her family encouraged Scott-Miller to create Liberation Station, the bookstore is the product of Scott-Miller’s own extraordinary imagination. “I had to practice arriving in my power,” she says. “It’s one thing to know your purpose, but it’s another thing to fully arrive in it. For me, that means recognizing that this is an extension of my brilliance, my giftedness, and my genius, and fully owning that.”
In March, Scott-Miller connected with a second near-mythical figure in history, when Liberation Station received the Obama Foundation certification. Scott-Miller explains: “This certification gives us the opportunity to garner federal partnerships and gives us access to a global network of advocates and mentors.”

What started as a mission to safeguard her family’s legacy became a calling to provide access to literature in which children of color—and everyone connected to them—can see themselves. “The representation we provide through Liberation Station bookstore is necessary,” Scott-Miller says. “We are the living link to this community, and to narratives that must be shared.”

“This is what was bequeathed to us”
By Gregory Orr and Taian Lu

Click the image or here to hear “Careful”.

“Careful”
By Devin Bustin

Careful
You’re about to get an earful
Or even get a mouthful
And wouldn’t that suck?

You’re not
The only story at the bus stop
The only one who needs a day off
But you’re the loud one on the phone

I know
I’m the one who’s got the headphones
With the monologues of my own
But it’s the one that I choose

I’m not
Trying to keep you within earshot
So I’m applying earlock
To hear myself think

Take me
Where I can think clearly
And maybe
I won’t mind my mind

This city
Where everybody sits near me
And I’m learning how to sit beside myself

Tell me
Who’s the tallest in your family
Who’s carrying a baby
Who’s carrying grief

Me, I was an ocean in my past life
I don’t know why I look away
When people wave

Each of our pandemic experiences are unique. Camilo is a 16 year old who lives in New York City with his mother and two siblings in a shelter with no Internet. May his account of personal reconciliation and resilience be an inspiration.

Camilo R. (Illustration by João Fazenda for the New Yorker)

As Told To: An Unhoused High Schooler’s New Nest
By Zach Helfand

A year ago, we talked with a fifteen-year-old named Camilo, who lived with his mother and two siblings in a shelter with no Internet. The family shared one unreliable laptop and one cell phone. When they spent a night at the home of friends, to use their Wi-Fi, the shelter kicked them out. Last week, Camilo brought us up to date.

We still don’t have Wi-Fi, but I have a school iPad that has service. Last spring, we moved to a shelter on the Lower East Side. I didn’t like it because I had to share a room, and I need my own space. But I liked the vibe. It was a good neighborhood, next to East River Park. I had a place to jog. I had a place to feed the birds.

In July, I hadn’t seen anybody in so long, so I took the Staten Island Ferry with one of my old friends from the Bronx. In Battery Park, a squirrel kept following me. I could tell it was hungry. It was, like, reaching toward me. Then I remembered: I had peanuts in my bag! Next thing you know, a ton of pigeons come, a ton of squirrels. I even fed the squirrel by hand. They were really friendly animals. I don’t know if it was because of my aura—I had a crystal on my neck. That was the happiest I’d been in a while.

After that, I would go to East River Park almost every day. There was nothing else to do, because of quarantine. I didn’t have any friends because I’d moved to a new neighborhood—nobody’s going to get near you with this virus. But the birds would see me from afar, and they’d come flying. There would be ten birds on my lap, on my shoulder, on my head, too. I was like a male Snow White! I really wish I had a friend to record it—I’m pretty sure that would’ve gone viral.

One bird was white with two bracelets on its feet, an escaped racing pigeon. I’d been feeding him for months, but I didn’t know that they’re not supposed to be in the streets, that they could get killed by a hawk, that they don’t have the instincts. The white pigeon was always alone. He wouldn’t fly with the other birds. I brought him to the shelter. Another day, I went to Union Square. I saw a bird with a broken leg. He was trying to get the food that I was throwing, but he couldn’t. He was just hopping around on one foot. I caught him, too. His name’s Rocky. The white one is Zen.

Zen never really liked me. Rocky is different, because I rescued him. I bought a first-aid kit, looked up a bunch of YouTube videos, and made a cast until the foot was healed. I got some vitamins, pills, and pain-relief cream. He loves me. When I call his name and snap my fingers, he’ll fly to my hand. He’ll make a happy noise when he sees me. When I pet him, he’ll close his eyes and purr.

We’ve been in shelters since 2019. We’ve been on the nycha waiting list for, like, ten years. Until I bought a cage, the birds lived in a crib. I taped a blanket around the bars. I had a ritual to hide them from the maintenance men. It wasn’t difficult until my mom snitched. I had to talk with the social worker, who made me leave them at my grandma’s house. It was hard to let them go.

Maybe this quarantine changed me for the better. I’m starting my first business right now, selling crystals. It’s called Faith in Stones. I became a vegan, too. My mom doesn’t really support it, so I buy my own stuff. Right now, I’ve got celery, blueberries, strawberries, bananas, kale, spinach, broccoli, and asparagus.

I got jumped last year, so they transferred me to a new school. They put me in twelfth grade—I skipped eleventh. I thought it was an accident, but the counsellors said I’ve got enough credits. I’m gonna be sixteen in college! As soon as I could, I went in person to school. I stopped after a few days. It was whack. I wanted to go meet new people, but there were only three others in the room. All we’d do is sit down and do Zoom. What’s the point?

In December, they told us that they’d found an apartment for us. They gave us the address and everything. I missed school so we could pack. Then they told us it’s not ready.

We finally moved two weeks ago. The place is small, there’s no furniture—I’m used to sleeping on the floor anyway—and bringing back the pigeons was a lot of work. But I felt free. I had my own room. And I had my own key! Now if I ever get some friends I can bring them here. I talk to this spiritual girl, she’s into crystals and all that. I still have the pigeons only because I want to show her. After that, I’m gonna find a new home for Zen, and I’m gonna set Rocky free. ♦

This interview was originally published for the New Yorker magazine.

“The V-Word”
By Courtney Napier

I like to think of myself as a gentle person. I get it from my mother. She is one of the sweetest, gentlest people I know. I remember having friends over as a teenager and they would say, “Your mom is so zen!”

What many don’t know is that, while gentleness for majoritized Americans — white people — is a cultural ideal, for Black women like my mother and I, it is also a technique for our survival. Earning the moniker of “angry Black woman” can be a difficult and oppressive label. The power elite in American (and Western) society does not account for the range of emotion and expression that white men and women receive. In fact, the spectrum is such that white men have incredible latitude for emotionality and reactivity to life’s highs and lows, as we have seen in historic moments from the Boston Tea Party to Disco Demolition Night to the UNC Tarheels defeating the Duke Blue Devils in their NCAA Basketball Final Four matchup this weekend. On the other hand, women and minorities have little room to respond to life’s most powerful moments with true human authenticity, however fair or flawed, without drastic repercussions.

This societal pressure cooker does two things. The first is that it sends those ripples of traumatic emotionality down our societal hierarchy. Minoritized men and masculine-presenting people take out their frustrations on each other, minoritized women, children, and so forth. Secondly, the Power Elite and their allies cannot fully flourish because they have preoccupied themselves with policing the behavior of others and protecting their privilege instead of embracing the human struggle in its proper, collectivist reality.

This leads me to the “V-Word”: violence.

A couple years ago, I was in an impromptu discussion about the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd. I was the only Black woman in the conversation, and my comments included the words “violence” and “justified” in the same sentence. I wasn’t able to finish my point — which was that while there was very little retaliatory violence during the protests even in the midst of the state sanctioned violence inflicted by the police — before the other individuals in the discussion were immediately up in arms. The phrases “violence is never the answer,” and “violence is unacceptable,” and “only non-violent protest is effective. Violence ruins the important work of liberation.”

I thought of this moment when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars two weeks ago. Again, the immediate reaction by many (predominately white) celebrities and commentators was swift and intense vilification of Smith’s actions. The issue here was very similar to what I experienced, which is a very specific and intentionally narrow definition of violence. I use the word “intentionally” because there is a conscious or unconscious desire baked into white supremacy to make violence something only a small number of inferior people do, and not something that happens on a broad, systemic level. The purpose of this is to obscure the many harms that are inherent to white supremacy while spotlighting behavior of individuals deemed deviant (notice I did not say deviant behaviors, because Elites and their closest allies are often excused of such behaviors and rarely face consequences).

Coretta Scott King, a woman who faced many forms of violence against herself and her family during her life, had this to say:

“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.”

Indeed, the society we at Common Good hope to contribute toward building is one with little to no harm of any kind. To get there, it’s important to not write ourselves out of the story and be generous in our definitions of harm and violence so that they can all be addressed.

In an onboarding meeting for a new Common Good team member, I shared something that I want to share with you. Our three pillars: a sense of belonging, significance of place, and eliminating economic isolation, are purposefully undefined in explicit terms because there is power building a common understanding based on the diverse perspectives of the collective. In the Beloved Community, there is no need for the idea of deviance (and, therefore, disposable individuals), nor is there a need for the binaries that create such criteria. Instead, each one does their best to both reduce harm and to speak up when harmed so that an opportunity of reparation and reconciliation is realized. When we choose to reject the urge to make a feature of our current society taboo, we can finally see it in the spectrum in which it exists and address it with collective wisdom and authentic accountability that will bring us closer to the safe, flourishing society we deserve.

Poet Warsan Shire Hopes You Can Make the Voices in Your Head Your Friends

Somali British poet Warsan Shire has had many projects, including running a popular Tumblr page and collaborating with Beyoncé. Now, she is out with a new collection of poems called Bless The Daughter Raised By A Voice In Her Head. That title is an ode to how she was raised, having to take on a lot of responsibility from a young age. But Shire told NPR’s Sarah McCammon that it’s also an ode to the children who are able to turn those voices into their friends instead of struggling with them as she has.