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moosegurl2 's review for:
Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
by Mychal Denzel Smith
"In the runup to November 8, 2016, I heard good liberal white folks promise, or maybe they thought of it as a threat, to move to Canada in the event that Trump won. I would nod politely and think to myself, 'how quaint, yet another move they plan to hijack from black people,' but it must be nice to know there's a place you can go where you will be free."
"As Americans, we are eager--ravenous, even--to believe the most flattering narratives about ourselves. They don't have to be true. The handwringing over the age of 'alternative facts' rings hollow when the history we teach is built on them."
"Before I moved to New York, my understanding of the city was shaped, like that of so many others, by the culture I consumed. It was a place to be survived. As a child, I knew it as a place where the hardest of the hardcore came up hearing gunshots every night, and Biggie declared that escape was only possible through crack sales or basketball skills. In my early twenties, it became the place where nebbish Woody Allen-types went to contemplate their own morality with other people who had read Camus."
"Bill Cosby will probably die in prison, but do we claim this as justice? It hardly even qualifies as accountability. Prison is a form of punishment that is an evasion of both these principles. Prison, as Angela Davis put it in, 'Are Prisons Obsolete?,' 'relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society.' "
"We are not cowards cowards because we fear violence--our lives have already been defined by so much of it. What we fear is a world in which we won't recognize ourselves."
"Myth can be where the imagination flourishes, where we tell stories about our ideal world. Such stories can contain the values we wish to uphold, the principles we believe must guide us, and the moral clarity to build systems that center empathy, care, justice, and equality. Without this imagining, there is no revolution. Where America is fucked up is by telling the myth as history, pretending that who we want to be is who we have always been, then building a proud and belligerent national identity out of the myth."
"As Americans, we are eager--ravenous, even--to believe the most flattering narratives about ourselves. They don't have to be true. The handwringing over the age of 'alternative facts' rings hollow when the history we teach is built on them."
"Before I moved to New York, my understanding of the city was shaped, like that of so many others, by the culture I consumed. It was a place to be survived. As a child, I knew it as a place where the hardest of the hardcore came up hearing gunshots every night, and Biggie declared that escape was only possible through crack sales or basketball skills. In my early twenties, it became the place where nebbish Woody Allen-types went to contemplate their own morality with other people who had read Camus."
"Bill Cosby will probably die in prison, but do we claim this as justice? It hardly even qualifies as accountability. Prison is a form of punishment that is an evasion of both these principles. Prison, as Angela Davis put it in, 'Are Prisons Obsolete?,' 'relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society.' "
"We are not cowards cowards because we fear violence--our lives have already been defined by so much of it. What we fear is a world in which we won't recognize ourselves."
"Myth can be where the imagination flourishes, where we tell stories about our ideal world. Such stories can contain the values we wish to uphold, the principles we believe must guide us, and the moral clarity to build systems that center empathy, care, justice, and equality. Without this imagining, there is no revolution. Where America is fucked up is by telling the myth as history, pretending that who we want to be is who we have always been, then building a proud and belligerent national identity out of the myth."