Status Updates From Just Us: An American Conver...

“One of the things I think is true, which is a way of thinking about the afterlife of slavery in regard to how we inhabit historical time, is the sense of temporal entanglement, where the past, the present and the future, are not discrete and cut off from one another, but rather that we live the simultaneity of that entanglement. This is almost common sense for black folk. How does one narrate that?"Saidiya Hartman

This is a bit embarrassing to admit (which is why I'm doing it), but it was at this point I got a little irritated. Why was she thinking so much about her blackness? It's almost obsessed. Like, I'm not obsessed with my asian-ness like that. Which is part of the problem. After all, I didn't grow up in white America. When she was a girl, the world made everything about her blackness. I didn't live that

"What if you're the destruction coursing beneath / your language of savior? Is that, too, not fucked up? / You say, if other whie people had not... or if it seemed like not enough... I would have..."