Excerpted from: Katherine Young's 'The Inhabitation of Time': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tYA9U1NGRM


Excerpted from: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/opinion/paul-krugman-nobody-said-that.html

Finally, there’s a third option: You can pretend that you didn’t make the predictions you did.

But nothing you predicted actually comes to pass. What do you do?

You might admit that you were wrong, and try to figure out why. But almost nobody does that; we live in an age of unacknowledged error.


Excerpted from: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/opinion/black-culture-is-not-the-problem.html?_r=0

In the absence of a perceptible “white power structure,” the discussion around Baltimore has quickly turned to one about the failings of black culture. This confuses even those who sympathize with black hardship. When people took to the streets and destroyed property, most observers did not see an understandable social response to apparent state inaction. They saw, in the words of President Obama, “criminals and thugs.”

To be fair, the president has tried to show empathy for the dispossessed. But he is also fighting myths about degenerate black culture. Condemning “criminals” and “thugs” seems to get him away from beliefs about broad black inferiority.

Yet when black people of influence make these arguments, it prevents us from questioning Baltimore the way we questioned Ferguson.

Instead, we lionize people like Toya Graham, the Baltimore mother who went upside the head of her rioting son. Baltimore’s police commissioner applauded her, pleading with parents to “take control of your kids.” But the footage certainly affirms violence as the best way to get wayward black people under control.

Moreover, by treating a moment of black-on-black violence as a bright spot, we take our eye off the circumstances that created the event. We forget, for instance, about how officials, in their fear of black youth, issued what witnesses said was a pre-emptive riot-police blockade hemming in students around Mondawmin Mall, where looting erupted.

The problem is not black culture. It is policy and politics, the very things that bind together the history of Ferguson and Baltimore and, for that matter, the rest of America.