this passage came to me twice:
“The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”
first i saw it in Krass Journal, which i found on the street some weeks ago and scooped up for future collages. then i read it again on Friday in Eula Biss’s essay, All Apologies.1 i figured i needed to read it, to be with it again. the words belong to Black poet and theorist Fred Moten, uttered in a conversation with his collaborator, Stefano Harney at the end of their book The Undercommons.
it felt like a another expression of the relationship with self that I heard Nicole Newman describe in an interview on the Emergent Strategy podcast, when asked what she was practicing. she said,
squeak indeed. the well within ourselves. it is there. there’s a lot of shit clogging all our wells but i believe that our wells are accessible and can be restored. fresh water.
Moten is referring to white people tangled up in white saviorism who bypass the ways that this system hurts them. those folks, a category that i am sometimes a part of, are not in touch with their own pain, are not in touch with their own hurt, yet imagine that they have So Much To Offer The World, are The Ones To Save Black People and all the other nonwhites. this delusion is one of the more sinister consequences of the insidious and enduring superiority complex that gets installed in us. it leads us so far away from ourselves.
it is neither instantly gratifying nor particularly pleasant, but i think the more i know what i’m bringing in the hurts department the more i might discover what i can offer to the coalition. the more i meet my own shit with kindness the more capable i am of offering you some. the more we can actually meet each other to study something other than war, other than the wound.