Read with me: Baldwin, bail funds, and a poem
Read with Me is my weekly selection of articles and more from across the internet— an assortment of current events, commentary, contemplations and more.
Behind the rise in bail fund donations
Why It Matters That So Many People Are Donating to Bail Funds via The Atlantic: Unlike vague symbolic displays, bail contributions remedy an injustice directly. The popularity of these donations signals a quietly radical shift in many people’s attitudes toward American policing.
A conversation from 1968
“James Baldwin: How to Cool it” via Esquire: “In Esquire‘s July 1968 issue, published just after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., the magazine talked to James Baldwin about the state of race relations in the country. We’ve republished the interview in full—and his words are incredibly relevant today.”
Thoughts from Ta-Nehisi Coates
Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is hopeful via VOX:The author of Between the World and Me on why this isn’t 1968, the Colin Kaepernick test, police abolition, nonviolence and the state, and more.
Inside LinkedIn’s disastrous town hall on race
“Audio recordings emerge of LinkedIn’s disastrous town hall on race” via Fast Company: The social platform used by millions for networking, recruiting and career-building has a serious problem with its own leadership and company culture.
We’re paying for Confederate monuments to exist
“The Costs of the Confederacy” via Smithsonian:In the last decade alone, American taxpayers have spent at least $40 million on Confederate monuments and groups that perpetuate racist ideology
A collective poem for our times
“Running for your life: a community poem for Ahmaud Arbery” via NPR: “The art that comes from hurt and pain is compelling and formidable.” NPR received 1,000 poems and emotional reflections on what it means to be black and safe in America today, which NPR’s poet-in-residence expertly wove together into a community poem.
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK
“We’re taught that the defining feature of the state is its monopoly on violence. That’s a very grim view. If instead you began with the idea [that] the point of the state is to instantiate values of nonviolence, values of flourishing, then you might build something very different.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, this week in VOX