"The Right to Vote is the right to protect all the other rights” – Thomas Paine || “Doors of injustice are everywhere and we cannot stop knocking.” – Rep. Park Cannon
FOMO on Accountability FOMO on The Audience
[Folks are still dying in isolation wards. This is an image of latex gloves filled with warm water provided for patients as a substitute for companionship. Via Twitter.]
While the bulk of my work as a communicator is about making complex ideas accessible, it’s also about convening difficult conversations. Perhaps that’s why I admire – and seek out – those who facilitate dialogues well and are able to create environments which spark insight. And… maybe that’s why I bristle at bad faith arguments, disinfo, and our too-frequent collective amnesia.
This week’s FOMO explores the meaning of allyship; reckons with our harrowing history of “civilization, colonization, and extermination” – both long ago and yesterday; is edified by great legal minds on their take on the GOP’s new religion about corporate “free speech”; sounds an alarm on America’s vaccine nationalism; and inspired by both great artists in conversation, as well as how a theater ensemble reinvented itself over Covid by centering its audience.
I was able to mark the one-year anniversary of Covid by scoring a first shot of Pfizer in my non-dominant upper arm. In the twenty-eight days between, I caught myself re-listening to the audio diary of Andrew Tuck, Monocle magazine’s Editor-in-Chief. While his was a glimpse into a very rarified year-long London lockdown, in many ways Tuck’s random interactions with his neighbors were universal; an unfolding meditation of great loss and adaptation.
VAXX NATIONALISM
While we are rapidly approaching the point where anybody who wants a shot can get one in the States – in theory – I am pained that my friends in Montreal, in Berlin, in Buenos Aires, are months off from accessing these mRNA miracles. This article in the Times makes the point that the U.S. could have made the vaccines patent-free, but chose otherwise, tremendously slowing down access to the developing world. This week’s Johns Hopkins Foreign Affairs podcast takes up the issue of global vaccine manufacturing and distribution and looks at W.H.O.’s Covax program, the global vaccine alliance – its financial shortfall and its goal to only vaccinate 20% of the world’s poorest countries over 2022. I’ve previously quoted Dr. Steven Thrasher but his thinking on the matter expresses my frustration, namely that we aren’t vaccinating those who are high risk first -- people in prison, shift workers, farm workers, undocumented folks -- anyone living in congregant living settings really. And that we’re opening up despite this!
THE BALDWIN SINGULARITY
I love a smart podcast on music, and the hope and joy they can sometimes confer. I’ve previously commended Switched on Pop and Dissect to FOMO ears. Object of Sound – which launched in 2021 and I’m only just encountering – is glorious. Hosted by critic and poet Hanif Abdurraqib, an episode last month featured the host in Vulcan mindmeld with Meshell Ndegeocello and her most recent project – Chapter and Verse: The Gospel of James Baldwin. Listen to their shared wisdom, participate in her project, and (re) discover her seminal CD Plantation Lullabies. As for Hanif – he was recently interviewed by Sam Sanders about his new book -- A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance – which I cannot wait to consume.
If Hanif has taken on the task of parsing the mythologies of Whitney Houston and the Soul Train dancers, Raoul Peck – whose last film was the acclaimed I Am Not Your Negro – which like Ndegeocello’s project, pays tribute to James Baldwin – is looking back at a thousand years of colonization. His towering four-part docudrama, Exterminate All The Brutes is what you get if you cross Guns, Germs, and Steel with the 1619 Project. It is, in fact, informed by not just by the titular Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist; but also An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot. This interview on yesterday’sAll of It by Alison Stewart is less than a half-hour, but it captures Peck’s mission and process. Did you watch Ava Duverney’s When They See Us? It’s like that: Harrowing. Unbearable. But a must see. (Lest I forget, film critic/author Matthew Zoller Seitz currently has copies of The Devil Finds Work, a Baldwin compilation of his writing on movies and identify. Grab one.)
RACISM IS EMBEDDED IN OUR CODE
If The Social Dilemma was lauded because it was a documentary critiquing social media which you could show your Fox-loving grandfather, Coded Bias is a rigorous effort looking at how we replicate racism and sexism in our technologies. The doc first premiered on PBS’s Independent Lens and is now on Netflix. Front and center is Joy Buolamwini, a computer scientist at M.I.T.’s Media Lab who discovered that facial recognition technologies didn’t recognize her Black face. When I first heard about this it caused me to re-watch “Racial Sensitivity,” a Better Off Ted episode where a Black staff scientist is trapped at his office after hours for that same reason. Note: This was NINE YEARS AGO and a sitcom, people! Coded Bias is ultimately inspiring, in particular as Buolamwin charts her activism back to a Harvard Book Store reading by Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction. Joined by Cathy and other kindred spirits – mostly women who are also data scientists – they’ve formed the Algorithmic Justice League, to combat bias in technology.
RACISM IS EMBEDDED IN OUR PENAL CODE
Like many of you, I’ve been tuning into the Derek Chauvin trial. I’ve been moved to tears by the witnesses who wished they could have done something, anything more to save George Floyd’s life; and have felt my blood pressure spike whenever Chauvin’s lawyer speaks. It won’t calm you, but I do recommend this Nation article by Elie Mystal. With concision, he explains how a key SCOTUS case, 1989’s Graham v. Connor, essentially sanctions murder by our Men in Blue. This original sin, if you will – defines to this day “reasonable” use of force. And that, he offers, must be changed.
FILLING THE POOL
Heather McGee expresses a measure of cautious optimism, giving credit to Biden for breaking with precedent and identifying “advancing racial equity” as one of the five cornerstones in his stimulus – and indeed, a “whole of government approach.” Ms. McGree is presently on book tour for her well-timed new book, The Sum of Us, and argues that Biden’s infrastructure plan can be a break with the past: A proposal for a truly shared “public good,” as opposed to our response to Brown v. Board of Education in the 1950’s – literally draining public pools to avoid de-segregation. But as Exterminate reminds us, there remains so much unsaid before we can heal. I’ve been meaning to reference this recent episode of Still Processing with Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham – a frank discussion on the history and usage of “The N-Word.” Have a listen into this very intimate exchange, which surfaces that Morris and Wortham were raised with very different familial outlooks on the epithet’s usage.
SOLIDARITY
If I wasn’t already, I finally got on the hope train after watching this conversation on allyship between Sherilynn Ifill, Executive Director of the NAACP LDF, and John C. Yang, her counterpart at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, AAJC. The discussion, hosted by the Washington Post’s Ye Hee Lee, is a quick half-hour and worth every second. Here’s the transcript, if you’d prefer it to video. Ms. Ifill - who should be Biden’s first SCOTUS pick – shares their twined history in struggle, and how the NAACP LDF frequently acted as an incubator for advocacy groups, including AAJC. While it’s clear that Ifill was a Cassandra where Atlanta is concerned – she explicitly warned Biden’s DoJ over the winter that hate crimes against AAPI folks were going to explode – she reflected: “Charlotte. Pulse. Tree of Life. Atlanta. A terribly unifying moment. But a clarifying moment.” Let’s be proactive and support the work.
WHAT HAPPENED HERE?
Despite being in the minority, it appears that the GOP members of Congress will have their say: That January 6th, 2021 will be erased from our collective memories. (It’s what we do; see above). Not to mention the last four years. There are, fortunately, a number of people who want to do more than remember: They want to reconstruct what we didn’t know at the time, and prevent this atrocity from occurring ever again.
This week saw the launch of After Trump, hosted by Virginia Heffernan, who helmed most episodes of Trumpcast over the last four years. The six-episode pod is an opportunity for her to serve as interlocuter for an emerging book project of Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith and former White House Counsel Bob Bauer which aspires to no less than reconstruct the presidency. Episode 1 looks at how the Former Guy flouted the practices of disclosure and failing to liquidate assets – and the conflicts of interest which arose.
Other lawyers are at work as well: On her weekly Amicus podcast, host Dahlia Lithwick introduces us (to me, at least) to the brilliant Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, who holds forth on this week’s weaving and bobbing by (Minority) Leader McConnell -- a friend to all corporate donors – except, apparently, when they stand up for voting rights.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE ACROSS TIME
I’ve attended perhaps a dozen productions of Theater of War over Covid. While their casts are star-studded from Bill Murray and Jeffrey Wright, to Oscar winners like Frances McDormand to Oscar Isaac, it’s the audiences that they center that makes the difference. Artistic director and translator Brian Doerries has found the relevance and immediacy of plays from Oedipus to Medea to Antigone. And he’s recast performances to be reconsidered in the context of Ferguson and Covid – having essential workers, trauma surgeons, and community activists take part in both the productions as well as the Q & A’s which follow. While there’s a massive convening on April 27th – the Nobel Prize Summit: Our Planet, Our Future - listen in to this impassioned back-and-forth between Brian Doerries and Krista Tippet, the Buddha-like host of On Being, on Brian’s process and Theater of War’s launch of a new form of global amphitheater.
PRINCE, THE RESURRECTION
This week the Prince estate announced the release of a new album’s worth of material, recorded back in 2010. Here’s the trailer. Welcome 2 America is Prince Rogers Nelson at his most sardonic, prescient on social media. Would this have been averted, he had released it a decade ago?
Welcome 2 America
Where U can fail at ur job
Get fired, rehired
& get a 7 hundred billion dollar tip
Come on N, sit right down
& fill up ur pockets, yeah
Mass media
In4mation overload
REMEMBER THE PEARL
The Washington Post reminds us that April 15th commemorates the 173rd anniversary of The Pearl – where 77 enslaved people boarded the schooner, docked in Southwest DC, hoping to sail for the Free State of New Jersey. They were soon betrayed and brought back to the District, marking the incident as the largest nonviolent escape attempt by people in slavery in U.S. history. Next Thursday, April 15th at 7pm, there will be an online broadcast from Westminster Presbyterian Church to recognize the event. The program will feature a reading of the names of the Pearl passengers, as well an appearance by a descendant of a passenger on the Pearl. You can Zoom in here.