What I've Been Up To

I’m working on a couple of book proposals that are not finished and I want them to be. So for today, I’m going to share some links to a few of the things I’ve been seeing, reading and thinking about lately.

• I’ve been listening to this Psychedelic Podcast from Third Wave. I had some people tweet at me about my idea of giving psychedelics to help people leave neo-Nazi groups after this item appeared on several news outlets about a white supremacist who took a clinical dose of MDMA and experienced a profound transformation. Mostly, people were eager to tell me that THIS WILL NEVER WORK because there are assholes taking psychedelics, many of them in Silicon Valley. Please keep it moving.
• Last weekend, I had the great pleasure of seeing the queer comic Gina Yashere perform. It was so much fun with a bunch of over 40++ dykes, queers, and all the Nigerian aunties were in the front row decked out in regal splendor. Here’s a short bit about introducing her queer, white partner, Nina, to her Nigerian, English mom. Props to Nina! (I would’ve done the exact same.)
• This is a beautiful, epistolary post between two writers, Jami Attenberg and Kiese Laymon, that I found moving and inspiring. If you haven’t read Kiese Laymon, consider this your regular reminder to fix that. I was hooked after I read this essay of his almost ten years ago (how is that possible?), and then devoured all of his books. In 2018, I was lucky enough to work with him at a TinHouse Summer Workshop and it was life changing. Truly. Still grateful to him for that, and for the people from that workshop I’m still connected to.
• I read Being White Today by Shelly Tolchuk and Christine Saxman, and found it very useful for thinking about how to organize with white people around racial justice. They build their argument around Janet Helms’ typology of white racial identity, and they link each stage of development to a vulnerability it opens up for far-right talking points and how to counter each of those with a more positive, white racial identity. I think it will be important work for those of us doing this work in SURJ.
• This book, Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy by investigative journalists Claire Provost and Matthew Kennard, is on my to-read-next list. This is a new take on something I’ve been trying to get at in my thinking about the far right, civil society organizations and the State. In this interview, Kennard explains that the central thesis of the book is that corporations have swallowed the State, and civil society organizations along with it. I don’t know yet if they directly address the far right but they have a section about “corporate armies,” and the privatization of state power that I’m eager to read about given recent events in Russia. Here is an excerpt from the book if you’d like to read more.

Back to writing book proposals.