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My Collective Cultural Imagination Road Trip

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My husband is driving this noisy 16-foot truck filled with his studio materials and tools to our new home in New Mexico. A month ago, we caravanned southeast along this same route: part one of the move, our worldly goods. If I’ve been MIA (and I surely have), that’s why – packing up, moving, unpacking, all the arrangements attendant thereto, and fulfilling my work obligations have consumed months. For the first time in ages, sitting in the passenger seat, I have the mental space to ponder instead of only to plan and execute. I’m writing from that stretch of I-5 heading south dotted with a legion of wind turbines.

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Dare to Live The Future Now: Be An Emissary

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Do a little thought experiment with me. Imagine we’re sitting over a drink in your favorite place, but it’s 20 years from now. Instead of the dystopia mass media tell us to expect, look around: it’s the future we wanted to inhabit! “Think about how it would have been back then,” you say, “if we’d only known we had the power to accomplish all this.” “Yes,” I reply, rolling my eyes.

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Imaginings Roll Out!

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Across the cultural landscape, powerful dreamers everywhere are tapping into this same deep truth. Just two quick examples: the young organizers who formed Dream Defenders in 2013 to “develop the next generation of radical leaders to realize and exercise our independent collective power” chose a fierce and evocative name for their work. Earlier this spring, when Black Lives Matter called for voices to “help imagine a world where black life is valued by everyone, our rights are upheld, and the beauty and power that is our blackness is celebrated,” they called their action “In a world where Black Lives Matter, I imagine…..”

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Ethelbert Miller: A Sustaining Presence is Forced Out and Everyone Loses

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On 3 April, Howard University laid off eighty-four staff members, including E. Ethelbert Miller, a Howard alum and director of the university’s African American Resource Center. Though it doesn’t make the largest financial impact, cutting staff at the reeling university leaves the largest public impression that the institution is getting serious about costs, doing the hard thing for the greater good.

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My English Teacher’s Son Won the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award

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I met Lish half a century ago in a high school classroom in Millbrae, California. His kindness helped me survive four years as a strange, arty, activist teenager in a suburban world I found entirely incomprehensible, the first adult I met who looked at me and saw something other than an annoyance or a perpetual misfit.

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Class Suicide and Radical Empathy

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Last Friday, on the first night of Passover, I was asked to share a teaching on Moses, who led our people out of slavery in Egypt. A friend suggested I share it with you:
The idea that always arises for me when I think of Moses and many other leaders of spiritual or political revolutions is Amilcar Cabral’s concept of “class suicide.” Cabral was the revolutionary socialist leader of the national liberation movement that freed the Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau. “Class suicide” describes the act of dying to the privileged class of one’s birth – for instance, by taking a step with no return – and thus sacrificing one’s own privileged position and power in favor of full identification with the oppressed. In either political or spiritual history, a large proportion of such trailblazers were born into privilege.

Culture

Passing the (Star)bucks

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Little of the public scorn heaped on Starbucks’s “Race Together campaign for daring — however ineptly — to risk talking about racism has fallen on other large, predominantly white progressive organizations whose records are worse than Starbucks.

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A Story of My Heart

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I haven’t the faintest idea how to sum up the more than 500 stories uploaded to the People’s State of the Union website since late January. They came from story circles – a hundred people in a church basement or a handful in someone’s kitchen – organized in more than 150 places around the U.S. They came because people resonated with the USDAC’s assertion that “democracy is a conversation, not a monologue.”