Sublime

The early twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber says it well. While the nobility believe their superiority grows out of their “underived, ultimate, and qualitatively distinctive being,” no one in favored circumstances wants to admit the chanciness of privilege. “The fortunate man,” Weber says, “is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate

There are still people, including children, working in Southern tobacco fields. The past isn’t even past, as Faulkner put it. Recently, public health researchers have called attention to the poison seeping into the bodies of the children in tobacco fields, who are now mostly Mexican and Central American.

say? I was once reading an interview with James Baldwin, and he described a frustration he had with Langston Hughes. He said when Hughes told you about a lynching, it was too realistic. That Hughes sounded like his daddy. Baldwin preferred Countee Cullen. He wanted the art, the suggestiveness, the distance to make it possible to digest horror.

I’d only been alive seventeen years and I was already tired of paying for white folks’ feelings with a generic smile and manufactured excellence they could not give one fuck about. I’d never heard of white folk getting caught and paying for anything they did to us, or stole from us. Didn’t matter if it was white police, white teachers, white studen

A poet must be the master of simile, metaphor, and form, and of the precise use of vernacular and grammar, implication and innuendo.

After school, in the front seat of our Nova, you told me what white folk demanded of us was never fair, but following their rules was sometimes safer for all the black folk involved and all the black folk coming after us. You kept talking about how amazing it was that Mississippi had just elected its first progressive governor since William Winter.

On television I caught glimpses of the heroes of the Black Power movement. Muhammad Ali, Stokley Carmichael and Yuri Kochiyama were all preaching about the condition of black people, and Angela Davis was still regarded as the most dangerous person in the USA.