#Or maybe it’s just a conduit for antiblackness

[stuckinapril]

The more I try to learn about sudan, the more mad I get because I’ve been digging through reports and there’s barely any coverage. It all echoes the same thing with older data from 2023. I keep trying to find firsthand accounts of Sudanese people and I can’t. This is so unfair

[entactagn]

cw: racist violence  maybe this is the end of the world. or maybe it would feel like the end of the world, a void horizon, for those who have never felt not “at home in the world,” as Saidiya Hartman writes of the first known survivor in W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” -- a black messenger trapped in the vault of a bank in NYC for the hours it takes a comet’s toxic gas to kill nearly everyone on the street. at points in her re-writing (which i will be unable to do any kind of justice here, analytically, stylistically, or even as summary : click the link, read her piece !) it seems like the end of the world might have allowed him to shed the bind of the nonbeing the white supremacist world has condemned him to inhabit -- “when the disaster creates an opening or a leveling that might allow him to breathe inside his skin and be released from the enclosure of nothing and the condemnation of blackness,” Hartman writes

yet there are white survivors too, it turns out, and even now they want to lynch him. in “the graveyard of the world,” as Hartman says so unsparingly, throughout and in the end, which is happening now; in the unreproducible flight from the nothingness and blockaded exit off the track of worldlessness that white supremacy has chased black people onto; in the speculative moment Du Bois imagined and something like it that we’re now actually living through. it is sickening and heartbreaking to know that white people are that committed to their whiteness, that capital has penetrated this far into our fantasies of coherence, what we call being a person, and that we have so habitually bound ourselves to its reproduction through the terroristic dispossession of black lives; in the graveyard of the world white people still want to defend their property, their sterile purity: they, we, still want to subject the entire world to that order even when everyone’s life has been exposed to the opening of the disaster --  if that’s what whiteness is, a commitment to holding property in personhood so ingrained that one is willing to do anything possible to continue reproducing the property relations that make black life impossible -- no matter how many bodies it takes -- then it is a “we” we have to refuse to live under and aspire to -- “enough is enough”: even Sesame Street will tell you 

it may also be the case that this is the end of the world, and not just in the optimistic tone we might soothe ourselves with, where the end is just another horizon of possibility -- it is not: for so many people, for everyone who has lost their life to a cop’s sadistic fragility, the end is the end and all you can do is “hold one another,” Hartman says -- make loving other people into an endless hole “in a world where black life is all but impossible” -- in nothingness, in the void, in the graveyard : we don’t know who we’ll meet there, and we won’t know how to make their life any less impossible -- just like the end of the world will still be happening even when we think we’ve suspended it --  antiblackness is making it through to the other side of the end of the world too. any other worldmaking activity the disaster can open up, white supremacy will be there to close back down. abolition of the “we” that holds onto its possessory claim to whiteness when the world is ending (like it were someone to love, to “love”). abolition of the “we” that thereby holds its possessory claim on blackness -- as a personhood crossed out, nullified, marked residually and recurrently as the property on which the coherence of white self-possession depends  -- this is only possible if we can make another world out of the end, and that’s just one possibility: one that hope can hold open only as long as the optimism of reform (as if the world were not ending) fails to seize on it and appropriate it as its own   i heard someone speaking to 30,000 people today and their voice was ragged. i don’t know their name (i didn’t even see their face) but they spoke unsparingly, like Hartman, but also with a hope without optimism that felt like an opening in the disaster for collective freedom from white supremacy -- maybe there is a more crowded romance to be had in everyone turning to their friends and strangers and acquaintances and saying “i love you,” “we love you” --  so where are our tears. are they just another thing we have to keep to ourselves, a private digression? are there kinships out there in grief; in the endlessness of melancholia, its volatility. i didn’t see everyone, obviously. it just feels in retrospect like people (white people especially, but also people in all sorts of subject positions) are carrying on like nothing’s happening, like this isn’t the end of the world. patios are open. and that can be healing, i guess, if it means you’re opening your life up to someone or some life you haven’t before. it’s possible most people aren’t: a pacifying conduit back into the racial-capitalist ordinary. how can that be healing?  it seems like where the inhibition of whiteness comes in it is partly affective-- an inability to make melancholia endless, to grieve the loss of black life, but only accessing the grievance -- maybe you don’t need to feel the grief to propagate the grievance: but is that enough? just validating the grievance, supporting the grievance, saying the name and speaking out in the name of the grievance, but never entering into the grief? are white people sharing in the grief? are we going to let it boil down to “white guilt,” feeling it like an endless hall of mirrored reflexes on the surface of the self (a figure suggested by somebody on twitter)? are there any chances we can find to let ourselves and our claims to self-possession be overtaken with grief for the lives of our siblings even if that has to be refracted through a mourning for the damage done to that kinship by a cut that has for so unbearably long divided off the human from the non-human and assigned white people a near-exclusive entitlement to the fullness of the former at the expense of everyone else’s recurrent abjection to the status of the the latter?   liberal outrage can neuter or co-opt grief. a wicker park guy can march carrying a sign with the banksy graffiti of a guy throwing flowers ?? an irl example. yet then there’s that teen girl from kentucky you see online inconsolable about her family’s indifference to and casual vindication of George Floyd’s death -- that is not ok, she says. it’s not reducible to the acceptable idiom of outrage, which flares up and calms down, goes to dinner. it’s not a stance. it’s a reaction. it’s a wound that opens up when you see that not even the grievance can register for people you thought were your kin but it turns out that kinship depends on the indifference to black life.  where can i get out of it. where is anonymous desire?  we can’t keep letting the world go cold. maybe we’re learning and maybe we’re learning to look like we’re learning. i want the certainty of that voice in our ears again; i wish i knew what they had said word for word; i wish i could go over it all word by word