[…] I understand that China has no use for my affections. They will not save me from what many in this country see as the unforgivable fact of my foreignness, my blackness. Most pressingly, these affections will not save any of us from the long-term effects that exposure to this environment is having on our bodies.
We want to ignore racism and our participation in it, to see our part as pure progress, ourselves as good. We want to believe in white evolution.
These films offer artifacts of our American film heritage, inventing a coziness and togetherness of Christmas with a dash of entertainment that is apparently only available to and enjoyed by white people.
Whistleblowers, according to Fred Alford’s study, do not achieve redemption. They are not, in the majority of cases, acknowledged as heroes or truth tellers. Whistle blowing is rather an act of self-sacrifice, a suicide mission.
All of them appeared to be composed of sharp angles between muscle and bone, stretched taught and teasing the notion that a body can rip—that theirs hadn’t yet.