He distinctly remembers, some decade or so ago – much younger, more rigid and sanctimonious then – saying, “we do not want them to think we accept their sin.” New Spirit of Penn, the University of Pennsylvania’s gospel choir – but what was really, in his mind at least, his choir in the way he […]
Author: ashoncrawley
I Want New Dreams: On Rachel Jeantel and Citizenship
There was a friend I had once and we spent – in my 20/20 hindsight perhaps – too much time together. Meeting my last year of undergrad, our camaraderie, our communion, genuinely moved me deeply. Even today, maybe, still. But throughout our time together – dinners and lunches, walking and talking – there was a […]
Corned Beef and Cabbage, Shrimp and Crabs: For Assata Shakur
ONE One would grow weary of the list of foods I generally refuse ingesting: I don’t eat beef or pork, peas or boiled peanuts, and, of course, a lot of things in between. Something about being able to decide what one wants on one’s tongue, what flavors one decides to savor, is something I hold […]
“If they come in the morning…”: Gaza and Black Solidarity
one. I want to go outside. When i was a kid, my parents would force my brother and I to leave the interior of the house to play in the backyard – whiffle ball, basketball, hide-n-go-seek, freeze tag – or ride bikes in order to give them some relief from our noise. Theirs was a […]
the receipts: notes on voting abstention
one. I was defriended on Facebook this summer after a rather dramatic set of exchanges that took place publicly and I recently began to think about that defriending because I wanted to consider how mishearing and misreading were the grounds through which a purportedly critical analysis of my position was given and how that mishearing […]
Interrupted Attachments: On Rights, Equality and Blackness
Remaining attached to certain ideals even when – and sometimes, most especially after – privileges that accrue to such concepts have been pointed out and problematized, should force us to ask some serious questions about the relation of citizenship and subjectivity, the relation of citizenship as subjectivity, to ongoing processes of exclusion and violence. The […]
The Love of Black Mothers and the Care of Black Children
I In august of 2011, I had to call my mother – on a cell phone with not a lot of power left because I had been checking Facebook and texting friends, hoping to be released from a CT Scan clinic at Duke Hospital – to tell her that in less than two hours, I […]
whitney: an attempt at tribute.
RIP Whitney Houston i’m still in utter and complete shock regarding whitney houston. floored. very saddened. i left church this morning with some seething hope that i’d hear “it was an internet rumor” or a hoax or something. the weird thing is, my parents didn’t allow my brother and i to listen to “secular” music […]
Mamie Till’s Memorial
she wanted the world to see what they had done to her baby, Emmett. so as we quickly approach the day Emmett was violently violated and killed (August 28), i want to consider again the religious ethics that prompted his mother’s — Mamie Till-Bradley — desire for the world to experience the death of her […]
“I met a woman today …”: Concern as Aesthetic Practice
The reiteration :: we already have what we need in order to form a new world, a new world forged out of the material existence of that which already surrounds us. We have love, we have laughter, we have light. We have desire, we have depth, we have darkness occasioning the possibility of secretive and […]