Various Authors

Willie B. Wazir Peacock (We Will Remember You)

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There’s one poem credited to Bob Moses in the grand online archive of Civil Rights Movement poetry here. Moses put his own spin on an Odetta spiritual as he bowed to one of the Mississippians, Willie B. Wazir Peacock (1937-2016), at the core of the Movement in the early 60s. Moses’s song calls out in all CAPS to his Brother Willie who went under the hill with scarcely anyone outside Black ‘Sippi knowing what he gave them and this fuct country…

IT WAS WILLIE
WHAT GOT FREEDOM
IN THE DEEP BLACK ‘SIPPI

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Doing Our High School Teachers Proud? 

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A surprise turn into rooms at MoMA PS1 presenting Sohrab Hura’s oeuvre—far from art-wank—electrified our old friends’ winter break reunion trip to the museum.

The day was too good: arepas in Jackson Heights, Central Park night walk, a warm, free crib at the apartment where Dash was dog-sitting.

Now, we’ve come back together to mull over how Sohrab Hura’s work affected us that day and how he might get you going too…

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Voices from the Diaspora (Haaretz Podcast)

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Click on the Haaretz podcast below and you’ll find that all the speakers are worth a listen. If your time is tight, though, cut directly to Masha Gessen (at 14:20) who upholds a primary truth that’s often evaded by those who rightly condemn soft-headed, hard-hearted Israel-is-Over triumphalism (especially in the wake of October 7th). Gessen puts the cruelty of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians on the West Bank first.

What Was It Like Being Jewish Outside Israel in 2024: Franklin Foer, Masha Gessen, Tony Kushner and More – Podcasts – Haaretz.com

“It All Started at the Border”

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Back in May, Radley Balko spelled out the details of Stephen Miller et al.’s monstrous plans for a deportation army, (cholera) camps and “efficient” airlifts. (Per Miller: “So you build these facilities where then you’re able to say, you know, hypothetically, three times a day are the flights back to Mexico. Two times a day are the flights back to the Northern Triangle, right. On Monday and Friday are the flights back to different African countries, right.”)

A swatch from the opening of Balko’s piece:

Donald Trump wants to deport 15 million people. He has now made that promise on multiple occasions. He made similar promises during his first term, when he said he’d deport 8 million people. Back then, he was thwarted by institutional resistance, other priorities, incompetence, and his general tendency to get distracted.

But this time there’s a plan. It is not a smart plan, nor is it an achievable one. But it is an unapologetically autocratic plan.

“You don’t even try something like this unless you aspire to have an authoritarian government behind you,” Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition told me. “You’re talking about soldiers marching through neighborhoods across the country, pulling families out of their homes.”

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Rojava is in Danger

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With Donald Trump set to return to the White House, the future of Rojava is in serious danger. The last Trump administration green-lit Turkey’s 2019 invasion, resulting in mass displacement, ethnic cleansing of Kurds, and a brutal occupation that continues to this day. Since then, Turkish President Erdogan has threatened to launch another such invasion but repeatedly failed to secure approval from the Biden administration. Reports of Erdogan’s conversation this week with his “friend” Donald Trump suggest that the tides could soon turn in his favor yet again, and another major invasion could be on the horizon.

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Choosy Beggars (Election 2024)

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By David Aaronovitch, Bishop William J Barber II & Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Susan Bergeron, Carol Cooper, Stanley Corngold, Kristi Coulter, Benj DeMott, Mark Dudzic (with Katherine Isaacs & Adolph Reed), Bruce Hartford, Ty Geltmaker, Bruce Jackson, Bob Ingram, Dennis Kaplan, Eric Laursen, Queenie Lawrence, Bob Levin, Leslie Lopez, Addy Malinowski, Greil Marcus, Richard Meltzer, Dennis Myers, Zuzu Myers, Ron Primeau, John Podhorzer, Jim Rising, Aram Saroyan, George Scialabba, Micah L. Sifry, Emily Simon, Tom Smucker, Alison Stone, Scott Spencer, William Svelmoe, Lucian Truscott IV, and Leila Zalokar…

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“This Arab Activist in Israel Isn’t Afraid to Criticize Both Netanyahu and Hamas”

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Yuval Noah Harari recently pressed journalists to get representative voices from Israel’s Arab citizenry into mainstream discourse. There may be risks in promoting the notion that Israel is a relatively open society since the country has two tiers of citizenship. Yet it’s also true that 20 percent of Israel’s population is Arab. They may be the minority that can save Israel from itself, as Black people redeemed American democracy in the 50s and 60s by forcing the country to end segregation.

Your editor means to keep responding to Harari’s Call to center Palestinian voices, with a little help this time around from “Haaretz,” where the following piece was published earlier this month …
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Her Back Pages

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The back cover copy (translated into English by Noelle Canin and Erella Dunayevsky) from Dunayevsky’s Standing Voiceless and other Stories of Resilience.

“We parted. Jaber accompanied us. As we picked our way through the piles of earth resulting from the demolition on the mountainside, on our way to our car we’d parked on the main dirt road, Jabar suddenly stopped, bent down and pointed to the tiniest green plant forging its way through the collapse of stones and earth, saying: ‘This is a Za’atar sprout, it’s determined to live.’”

The collection of sketches in this book describe a journey of long-standing, intimate encounters with people who live under the unbearable reality of ongoing occupation.

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Barry Lynn’s Anti-Monopoly Jeremiad

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In 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois, in “Black Reconstruction,” assailed the American system of racism. Key both to his indictment of America and his dream for it, Du Bois provided perhaps the most perfect distillation of the American ideal of liberty:

“America thus stepped forward in the first blossoming of the modern age and added to the Art of Beauty, gift of the Renaissance, and to Freedom of Belief, gift of Martin Luther and Leo X, a vision of democratic self-government: the domination of political life by the intelligent decision of free and self-sustaining men.”

Du Bois ended with a quiet exclamation: “What an idea.”

What a piece by Barry Lynn in the September Harpers where he quotes from Black Reconstruction (and underscores Du Bois’s wonder-ender). Lynn’s “The Anti-trust Revolution: Liberal democracy’s last stand against Big Tech”—is a sharp yet rangy polemic.

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Joy And Pain x 2

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Donna Allen’s cover came through to me before Maze’s original. I dug how she seems to hold something back even as she doubles-down–wailing, crying, moaning for her life.  Allen’s version gets all of “Joy and Pain’s” deep bluesy amor fati. She’s performing for adults. This isn’t kid’s stuff…

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Contra Hamas & Israel’s New Centurions

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Your editor meant to post this Q&A with Yuval Noah Harari earlier this season but it’s still on time. Click here (and it might make sense to start around 4:50). Harari’s protest against Israel’s Roman turn remains urgent. As does his injunction to get representative voices from his country’s millions of Palestinian-Israeli citizens into mainstream discourse. (I don’t believe journalists have picked up on his prompts yet. Please let me know if I missed something on that front.) B.D.

Into the Tradition

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I perked up when “Taxi Brousse,” which sounded like a kora-cized version of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” came on Spotify’s Oumou Sangaré Radio. This 1 plus 1/2 minute song was put down a few years ago by 3MA — an Afropop supergroup made up of three players of different string instruments: Ballaké Sissoko from Mali on kora, Driss El Maloumi from Morocco on oud and Rajery from Madagascar on valiha. The band takes its name from the first two letters of each member’s country of origin in French: Madagascar, Mali, and Maroc.

One song led to another…

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