Over 100 voices challenging monolithic narratives of Blackness
“When you focus on the particular, you get the individual, not a stereotype.
What we all ought to seek is not universalism but transcendence, which cannot be achieved without honoring the particular. Transcendence cannot come from romanticizing the suffering of a people or by universalizing it—which is ultimately a form of ignoring it.”
— Chloé Valdary
My opinion has slowly changed. I still believe that racism exists and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms; I still believe that, on average, police officers are quicker to rough up a black or Hispanic suspect; and I still believe that police misconduct happens far too often and routinely goes unpunished. But I no longer believe that the cops disproportionately kill unarmed black Americans.
Two things changed my mind: stories and data.”
— Coleman Hughes
“So much of the national dialogue about race deals with either terrible trauma or black excellence. I was more interested in the space in between, because that’s where I exist. So the challenge was finding a space between sensationalizing and also documenting and contextualizing.
In writing a memoir you are forced to reinterrogate beliefs and feelings that may have settled over decades, and you start to realize that maybe in this story where I was the victim I was actually the villain. Maybe this person who I considered to be so confident was actually performing just like I was. Maybe I didn’t treat that girlfriend as well as I thought I treated her.”
“The Afro-pessimist sees the world as structured by a non-black solidarity in preventing the ontological possibility of black life. Were ‘black’ meant as a metaphor for the condition of total alienation from self, this might make sense. However, because the Afro-pessimist imaginary ties itself to a morphological account of blackness, this leads us to a theoretical dead end. In this world-view, it therefore becomes necessary to begin by treating ‘race’ as a problem fundamentally rooted in the formation of sociality – in which the Black precedes the historical order and the processes, both violent and mundane, which create her. By contrast, to think through the implications of contingency is to confront the reality that these racial categories – categories that Wilderson and Sexton treat as absolute – are actually unstable as evidence that something else is afoot. It is to see ‘race’ not as an anchor, but as a mystification conjured to weather crises of legitimacy.”
Carrying through with that contractualist conception, I also believe that a black person should have no immunity from being de-blacked. Any Negro should be subject to having his or her membership in blackness revoked if he or she pursues a course of conduct that convincingly demonstrates the absence of even a minimal communal allegiance.”
— Randall Kennedy
So all of these things that we continue to refer to are the things that me and my generation lived. We saw it for ourselves. We're not reading it in the history books – but we lived it.
All we do in America right now is talk about color. Every issue is about race – is about color. Instead of sitting down at the table like men and women of common sense and common justice, and understanding that our enemies are looking with a greedy vigilance upon us as we tear ourselves apart eternally.”