Kimberly Theidon

Another young black ma

Reading articles from years gone by, frozen newspaper photos at odds with white supremacy marching on across the decades since those men tortured, killed and gloated about killing a young teenage boy. In 1992, one of Emmett Till’s murderers complained that,”Emmett Till is dead. I don’t know why he can’t stay dead.” The murder of black men and boys in the United States continues, and the architecture of white privilege has yet to be dismantled. As T. Coates writes in Between the World and Me, “There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers…they are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy.  It is hard to face this. But all our phrasings — race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy — serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that is dislodges the brain, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.  You must never look away.  You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

I wish to add the categories “pain,” “outrage” and “allyship” to my Word Press drop down menu