As Brazier documents, city housing authorities and real-estate developers collude to interrupt Black childhood by designing spaces and building barriers within and around neighborhoods that make it hard to play freely. “Black children’s physical and creative movements threaten the hierarchical social order that requires passivity and resignation,”

attentive to the deceitful machinations of those who fancy themselves the self-appointed stewards of humanity.

While we still seem to be caught in the treacherous segue between stories, those cast as victims in old master narratives are writing themselves anew.

Paradoxically, many of these disciplinary policies are akin to the progressive vision espoused by eugenicists like Karl Pearson, justifying harsh discipline as a means to “close academic disparities.” Schooling becomes standardized testing without creative expression, arbitrary rules without room to breathe, Black Excellence without Black Joy.

America’s great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively, to a body like mine, and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.

the retreat into genetic and historical absolutes implies there is no use trying to write new stories. But I cannot abide that kind of intellectual fatalism, nor can most people who experience the deadly consequence of those Old Stories.

Who thrives in an undifferentiated environment?

why on earth would we believe that a colonizing impulse would magically lead to universal prosperity this time around?

One of the main ways art can disrupt the carceral imagination is by refuting the eugenic classification and fragmentation of people—desirable or deplorable, worthy or disgraced, precious or superfluous. Art can remind us who we are beyond the trappings of privilege or prison.