I love your hair / You always wear such interesting things
In Chile the students are marching. In Washington DC, Kirstjen Nielsen is gearing up for the start of her non-apology tour.
In two weeks I will walk out of my office for the last time. In a month I will give a talk about leadership.
What are our responsibilities to each other? is a question regularly and earnestly posed by philosophers and priests and almost never by the kinds of people who run large technology companies.
Are we there yet? is a question regularly and earnestly posed by children and the kinds of people who at one point or another believed in the arc of the moral universe.
We are not asking enough questions. We are not asking the right questions. We are not asking questions of the right people. How many questions does it take? What then are the wrong questions? Who should we stop asking?
We have not taken the time to study the foundations that will lead us to better questions. We have been distracted by the appearance of fluency that comes from familiarity and repetition; we are uncomfortable with the questing that pushes us past our comfort zones.
What is at stake in this inquiry? How did we get here in the first place? Wait, what were we talking about again?
Attribution:
I love your hair You always wear such interesting things What did you do before this Wow are you from Detroit What was that like Tell me what your thesis is about That sounds really powerful Your poem tonight was really intense You’ll appreciate this, you know, since you’re kind of ghetto You worked so hard you made it So what did you think about that Junot essay I’m suspicious of poems with an agenda, that have a certain aboutness Explain what you mean when you say risk I’m really uncomfortable
— from Monologues in Bars By White People With Good Intentions by Aricka Foreman
Addendum:
The link to “Like a Good Neighbor” by stacia l. brown did not render / save in some editions of the previous newsletter. I regret that I missed that. Here’s the quote again:
When Amber Guyger broke into Botham Jean’s apartment and stole what was left of his life, she imperiled everything we thought we knew about apartment living. Forced intimacies and polite detachment — all of it’s bullshit when the woman who lived in your building and shot you for no coherent reason is a cop.
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The next missive will be for $ subscribers only.