Ignorant-Bliss

5513

❝ People of color, women, and gays — who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before — are under pressure to be well-behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases when it would be more honest to say “racist”; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.

—

Excerpt from Teju Cole’s essay “The White Savior Industrial Complex”. (via beautravail)

//////// I was lucky enough to enjoy the company of Teju Cole in Goa (India) at the Goa Literature and Arts Festival at the end of 2011. We drank. We hung out. We made jokes about white people. He was familiar with my music and at that point I hadn’t been with his writing, although if you’re like me you know when someone “gets it” very quickly, whatever “it” is for you. I bought a copy of Open City and he signed it “to a fellow wordsmith” or something of the sort. I was honored. It was the PEN/Hemingway award and I was hell of happy for my dude. I highly recommended it before that and I highly recommend it again now, after that. (I lent my girlfriend my copy, she read it, enjoyed it immensely and it is now in the possession of a friend of hers. It’s the type of book you pass around - it’s very good.)

Your moms get passed around so much we call her Open City.

http://www.amazon.com/Open-City-Novel-Teju-Cole/dp/1400068096

-HKS

(via nehrujackets)

(Source: jalwhite, via nehrujackets)