morning pals, apologies for the late delivery - had a very rough weekend and was not in the headspace to rec anything. feeling better now though, just in time for a special edition of the newsletter.
as you probably all know, there have been massive protests going on in the US over the past week, sparked by the despicable, racist murder of an innocent 46 year old black man, george floyd, by minneapolis police. under these conditions of acute political rupture, the role of the rec cannot remain the same. with examples of brutal racism constantly appearing on our screens, more and more people are looking for anti-racist educational resources and practical means to get involved. any act of recommendation right now must acknowledge and work with these desires, and actively amplify anti-racism as much as possible.
so today’s recs are all about how you can support the anti-racist struggle ongoing in the US, and indeed, all over the world.
donating
while racism obviously won’t be solved by cold hard cash alone, for many of us in lockdown or living overseas, donating to various anti-racist organisations and individuals is the most immediately practical way to make a difference and show solidarity.
the main one people have been donating to has been the minnesota freedom fund, who are bailing out people who have been arrested while protesting in minnesota. they’ve also been advocating donating to various other anti-racist orgs, as can be seen below:
there is also this spreadsheet of a whole host of orgs and bail funds across the US, if you need other places to donate to.
reading
as victims of racism are often all too keenly aware, racism is all too easily forgotten after these concentrated bouts of media coverage and public attention, and it is exactly in that hidden realm that it thrives. this routine “forgetting” around issues of race affects all of us; none of us is completely separate from the media-attention complex, even the most committed organisers and activists.
you can combat this by committing yourself, as a longer term project, to engaging with literature around race and racism. this can take many forms (literature, theory/philosophy, religious or spiritual texts, newspaper articles, essays, films, tv shows, music) and the list below is absolutely non-exhaustive and incomplete for that reason.
i’d really like to hear from you after this goes out if there’s any other anti-racist texts/cultural products you’ve gained from in the past, and i’ll feature them in future newsletters. i’m particularly interested in the music/tv/film/literature dimension - because it’s not enough to just read explicitly about racism, but also to actually engage with the cultural products of other cultures that are racialised in the west. this is where i think a lot of white leftists, including myself, slip up. we read about these things from the outside, but never actually make the move into engaging with non-Western cultural products. it shouldn’t have to be said, but racialised people have lives outside being victims of racism, and it’s these ways of life, not just racism, that must be understood as part of an anti-racist education.
with that proviso, here are some things i personally recommend. the list is short on those non-Western cultural products (which is a clunky/awkward term, i know) i mentioned above, and if anyone has any recs on that front, please send them in.
alex vitale, author of the end of policing, wrote a good and to-the-point article in the guardian about the solution to police brutality being defunding, not reforming, the police.
vitale’s the end of policing is also available as a free verso e-book here
on the topic of verso, their collection of essays from the black radical tradition, futures of black radicalism, is good. i read this a couple of years ago and there’s some great essays in there - i recall nikhil pal singh’s chapter being a highlight, really clearly articulating the links between capital and race, and the concomitant “cheapening” of black life as a result. (if free e-book pdfs float your boat, i found one here)
yes, another verso rec: if they come in the morning: voices of resistance, edited by angela davis. this is a really good historical archive featuring texts (and poems!) from black panther activists in the 60s/70s, centred around davis’ arrest and imprisonment for murder, despite her innocence. if you need something to remind you why the CIA are scum, this is the ticket.
sara ahmed needs to be mentioned here - i read quite a lot of her in my masters degree and her writing, eloquent and lucid yet no less rigorous, puts a lot of theorists and philosophers to shame. strange encounters and the cultural politics of emotion, the two books of hers i’m most familiar with, very lucidly deal with the affective, lived dimension of racialisation.
matt from the excellent outsider music newsletter tusk is better than rumours had a great list of books around anti-racism in his latest newsletter.
music
short thing to end on; matt from tusk is better than rumours highlighted the work of theorist and curator deforrest brown jr., who records as speaker music. matt linked this great interview with him where he discusses the rhythms of capital in regards to race and urban space, and his role in the “make techno black again” campaign. very good discussion about how capitalism’s extraction and domination applies to the cultural domain as much as it does land and labour. (it’s remarkable how much white music is, effectively, stolen from black people.)
he also apparently has a book coming out called “assembling a black counter-culture”, which looks at the african-american working class roots of techno music. sounds incredible, and extremely my shit.
listen to a speaker music EP below, and donate via bandcamp:
next delivery thursday morning. x
jake