“I strongly lay claim to imagination, because to us Black women for a long time the possibility of imagination had been negated.”
Essays
Reimagining Italy through Black Women’s Eyes
Italy’s past, present, and future are no less marked by race than any other former colonial power. Acknowledging that is only the beginning.
Water as Right, Water as Future
Declaring water a human right is easy. But to actually secure that right, the best method—surprisingly—is bureaucratic sleights of hand.
B-Sides: Virginia Woolf’s “Flush”
Woolf’s spin on the genre of children’s fiction about animals is valuable because of its comedy, not despite it.
Shoptalk: Overheard at the Virtual Conference
In this parodic installment of Shoptalk, we salute the year of conferences that have tried to be.
“Soulful, Perhaps Even Magical” Science
Yaa Gyasi’s new novel meditates on the problems we try to solve with science, with faith, and with love.
Atlantic Slavery: An Eternal War
Both violent surveillance and disease risk were integral to Atlantic slavery. That same war against Black people continues today.
Rebuilding Solidarity in a Broken World
We can begin where we live, because our neighbors and neighborhoods shape us in ways that are invisible but invigorating.
Global Inequality and the Corona Shock
COVID-19 is the first truly comprehensive crisis of the Anthropocene era, affecting virtually everyone on the planet.
The World Is a Factory Farm
If factory farming is the source of pathogens like SARS-CoV-2, could smaller-scale farms and communities—even in China—be the safest alternative?
Picturing the Lost
In segregated neighborhoods throughout New York, memorials to those claimed by COVID-19 have appeared and evolved.
Covid Blindness
Withholding accurate information obscures both the impact of the pandemic on the most vulnerable and the resurgence of institutional violence.
Are We in Denial about Denial?
Across the political spectrum, people deny how bad the state of the world is. No wonder the far right’s lies have such purchase.
Emergency Urbanism
Housing-justice movements ask: How can unhoused people be considered trespassers on state-owned land?
The Violence of Urban Vacancy
Houses without people, people without homes: New York has invested in empty storefronts and empty districts, even as most New Yorkers suffer.
Fast Food, Precarious Workers
Today—as in 1968—it remains to be seen if McDonald’s pivot toward racial justice will mean anything for how it treats its scores of Black workers.
Can the Crowd Speak?
Occupy Wall Street’s great achievement was to briefly create a community that prefigured a robust democratic culture.
The Enduring Disposability of Latinx Workers
When employers fail to provide PPE, testing, sick pay, or job protection, the message is clear: Latinx laborers are “not us.”
How to Defund the Police
The inconvenient truth of police history in the United States is that police departments were not designed to keep a generic public safe.
To Heal the Body, Heal the Body Politic
Before 2020, the relationship that is the body was already ailing. COVID-19 heightens the need to heal it.
