“Barry and the Impossibility of American Redemption” by Rayne Weinstein (2019)
“However, critiques of restorative justice point out that at some level, there is a type of violence that cannot be redeemed. The model focuses on ‘reparation of injury’ for the victims, but in cases such as murder or sexual assault, the victim (or the victim’s family) cannot ever truly heal; there is no ‘compensation’ that would restore their life to what it was. Some also argue that recent integration of restorative justice has been centred on helping the perpetrator improve as a person, whereas responding to the needs of the victim is sidelined. We have to, somewhere, acknowledge that there is a violence you can never come back from without shedding our own self-centred obsession with personal repentance.”“Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” by Leslie Jamison (2014)
“For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman,” is how Simone de Beauvoir starts one of the most famous books on women ever written. “The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new.” Sometimes I feel like I’m beating a dead wound. But I say: Keep bleeding. Just write toward something beyond blood.
The wounded woman gets called a stereotype, and sometimes she is. But sometimes she’s just true. I think the possibility of fetishizing pain is no reason to stop representing it. Pain that gets performed is still pain. Pain turned trite is still pain. I think the charges of cliché and performance offer our closed hearts too many alibis, and I want our hearts to be open. I just wrote that. I want our hearts to be open. I mean it.”“Bad Feminist” by Roxane Gay (2012)
”I want to be independent, but I want to be taken care of and have someone to come home to. I have a job I’m pretty good at. I am in charge of things. I am on committees. People respect me and take my counsel. I want to be strong and professional, but I resent how hard I have to work to be taken seriously, to receive a fraction of the consideration I might otherwise receive. Sometimes I feel an overwhelming need to cry at work so I close my office door and lose it. I want to be in charge and respected and in control, but I want to surrender, completely, in certain aspects of my life.”“Joy” by Zadie Smith (2013)
”A final thought: sometimes joy multiplies itself dangerously. Children are the infamous example. Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you? Why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened, would mean nothing less than your total annihilation? It should be noted that an equally dangerous joy, for many people, is the dog or the cat, relationships with animals being in some sense intensified by guaranteed finitude. You hope to leave this world before your child. You are quite certain your dog will leave before you do. Joy is such a human madness.”“My President Was Black” by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2016)
”Last spring, we had a light lunch. We talked casually and candidly. He talked about the brilliance of LeBron James and Stephen Curry—not as basketball talents but as grounded individuals. I asked him whether he was angry at his father, who had abandoned him at a young age to move back to Kenya, and whether that motivated any of his rhetoric. He said it did not, and he credited the attitude of his mother and grandparents for this. Then it was my turn to be autobiographical. I told him that I had heard the kind of “straighten up” talk he had been giving to black youth, for instance in his 2013 Morehouse commencement address, all my life. I told him that I thought it was not sensitive to the inner turmoil that can be obscured by the hardness kids often evince. I told him I thought this because I had once been one of those kids. He seemed to concede this point, but I couldn’t tell whether it mattered to him. Nonetheless, he agreed to a series of more formal conversations on this and other topics.”“Unheard Grief, Unmovable Men: How an Old Mexican Folktale Speaks to Our Pain Today” by John Paul Brammer (2018)
”I am afraid of the silence game, of perfect grief; perfect, because it’s endless. Grief is meant to land somewhere, on something. I understand it as an agent of transformation. It’s meant to ferry one to a place where grief isn’t needed; a bruise feels strangely comforting when you press on it, then it turns yellow, the healing color, and goes away. But I am afraid of an endless blue-black bruise, of my brain rotting from grief. I am afraid of my disappointment becoming so great that I resolve to shrink into nothing, respond only with gasps and whispers of ‘no,’ a ghost who cries, and cries, and cries, and for what? For whom? All the wrong people are crying, and all the people who ought to feel something do not.”“SELFIE” by Rachel Syme (2015)
”This is the way that selfies become death masks, memorials to the idea that once, we existed. There is joy in confirming that you have a self, that you have a life, that the ultimate gift you didn’t ask for is real, that your body takes up mass. And then there is the sorrow of knowing the gift must be returned, that your ship has holes in it and will one day sink, that no body makes it to the other shore in tact. The ego, then, is about loving oneself enough to temporarily forget that we are all disappearing, loving oneself out of the terror of nothingness, loving oneself out of bed.”“On Smarm” by Tom Scocca (2013)
”Anger is upsetting to smarm—real anger, not umbrage. But so is humor and confidence. Smarm, with its fixation on respect and respectability, has trouble handling it when the snarkers start clowning around. Are you serious? the commenters write. Is this serious? On Twitter, the right-thinking commenters pass the links around: Seriously?”“A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof” by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah (2017)
”They are young, they are white, and they often brag about their arsenals of guns, because these are the guns that will save them in the coming race war. They are armed to the teeth, and almost always, they are painfully undereducated or somewhat educated but extremely socially awkward. That is, until their eyes are opened to the fact that within the world of white supremacy they can find friends. These young white supremacists call this reversal “weaponized autism.” What once alienated them now helps them relate to others, people like Dylann Roof, over a common desire to start a race war.”“The Legacy of Childhood Trauma” by Junot Díaz
”We clicked like crazy. Like our ancestors were rooting for us.”
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