On Saturday, August 9th in Ferguson, Missouri (just outside St. Louis), Michael Brown, an unarmed eight-teen year old African American man, was shot and killed by the police. His body was left on the street for more than four hours as riot police were called to the scene.
In the following days thousands of people have protested the latest summary execution of an unarmed Black man. They have been met with police brutality and repression, resulting in dozens of arrests, including the arrests of two reporters and a police assault on one St. Louis city alderman.
The apologists for racism attempted to use the justified and understandable outrage of those who burned a local convenience store to obscure the real criminals in Ferguson: police and politicians who treat the town’s Black citizens like colonial subjects; occupied by military force.
Read moreI have had this unfinished piece on black hair sitting on my computer for months now. However, considering that this past Tuesday was Toni Morrison’s 83rd birthday and her novel Tar Baby has one of my absolute favorite descriptions of black hair, I felt compelled to finish the piece.
Morrison’s oft-cited quote is one of my favorites because she strikingly captures the politics, history, and controlling images that are imbued in black hair. Describing one of the main character’s, Son’s hair, she writes:
Read moreFor all of the plays, pamphlets, manifestos and speeches Olympe de Gouges wrote during her short life, she is probably most famous for declaring Jean-Paul Marat "the abortion of the world."
We could read this statement polemically: however many revolutionary ideas Marat held, however diligently he militated against the monarchy, however crucial his paper to the success of the revolution, he was still no friend of the struggle for women's suffrage. Many thus read Gouges' statement as a wholesale rejection of Marat and his legacy. A sexist revolutionary is not a revolutionary.
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