WesRecs Vol. 25 -- Recommendations For You...From Wes...Enjoy!

“You have to think through the process of what would have to happen for someone to become infected,” said Dr. Andrew Janowski, instructor of pediatric infectious diseases at Washington University School of Medicine St. Louis Children’s Hospital. “You have someone who sneezes, and they have to have X amount of virus in the sneeze. Then there has to be so many drops that land on you.”

“Then you have to touch that part of your hair or clothing that has those droplets, which already have a significant reduction in viral particles,” Dr. Janowski said. “Then you have to touch that, and then touch whatever part of your face, to come into contact with it. When you go through the string of events that must occur, such an extended number of things have to happen just right. That makes it a very low risk.”

“Anything that I thought I said in the privacy of my own room has turned into a conversation with my roommates. The walls are thin. “Did I hear you’re being furloughed and your visa to remain in this country is now under threat?” my roommate, perched on our living room sofa, asked me when I came out to get a post-therapy snack from the kitchen. “Something like that,” I whimpered.”

“ My Google Home is the only thing that will talk back to me in this room. “Okay Google, do you ever get lonely?” I asked it recently at my mental nadir. “Everyone gets lonely from time to time,” it responded back in jilted HAL-9000. “I’m here if you need.”

"...the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is the most important, most pressing news story of our time. And while the mainstream media has been doing an excellent job of providing stories about COVID-19 and the pandemic, there’s still a huge lack of widespread daily coverage focused on the ways in which the disease and pandemic are disproportionately impacting the black community.

Not only will this lack of coverage likely worsen the pandemic overall due to a lack of greater awareness and information about the disease and pandemic within (and without) our community, but it’ll also devastate our community to a much greater degree. So, SpeakPatrice Presents: Coronavirus News For Black Folks aims to empower our community by circulating existing coronavirus (COVID-19) news and stories as it relates to the black diaspora and creating our own original FUBU [For Us, By Us] written and audio content to fill the many gaps in coverage, from how the disease and pandemic are specifically impacting our physical and mental health, our social and cultural structures and institutions, and more."

"For Gramsci, capitalist rule is secured by what he called “hegemony.” Capitalists as a class have successfully convinced the rest of us that their own particular class interest – maximizing profit – is in the interest of the rest of us. Think of the way we talk about the economy: business confidence is invoked as a measure of economic health, even though it doesn’t alter the fact that wages have remained stagnant for decades despite productivity gains. We conceive of abstract measures like “economic growth” or “GDP” as somehow corresponding to the common good – even though these figures tell us nothing about inequality or the well-being of the working class."

...

In Louisiana, 70 percent of Covid-19 deaths have been Black residents – more than double their percentage of the population in that state. Roughly comparable figures are available in Chicago, and in Michigan, Black deaths are nearly triple their percentage of the population. In St. Louis, every single death recorded at the time of writing is of a Black resident. The notion that the coronavirus is a “great equalizer” is ludicrous in a society in which Black people are systematically excluded from access to health care and stuck in precarious employment. Of course, this is also the predicament of much of the working class, but in the US, Black, Latinx, Native American, and Southeast Asian residents are at substantially higher risks than their white counterparts. In other words, these disparities didn’t originate with the virus but were exacerbated by them. (Though this would be news to the US Surgeon General, who blamed the racial disparity on behavior: “Avoid alcohol, tobacco, and drugs,” he instructed Black Americans from the White House podium.) The coronavirus is refracted through an already racist system in which residents of color are more likely to live in overcrowded housing and less likely to be able to work from home. The same is true globally. As the virus makes its way through cities of the global South, racialized populations living in precarious housing situations and lacking the ability to isolate are sure to be the most susceptible to infection and yes, death. This certainly gives Ruthie Gilmore’s widely cited definition of racism a new gloss: “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”

"The brain is more complicated than all the stars in the wide open sky out there, full of structures and pathways, all sending molecule-sized little electrochemical flashes to one another. If something had happened to my lungs, my knee, my liver, it would have happened to something in my body, something of mine. However something happened to my brain, and even the phrase “my brain” doesn’t make any sense; I am a brain. Something happened to me. But which part of my brain is me, and how is this so called “me” derived from electrical impulses and neuro-chemicals, molecules traveling around at light speed through the subway system of myelin-sheathed tunnels and synaptic transfer stations? Which is the part that takes care of itself? Which part is me? How does anything as massless and intricate as whatever I call “me” derive from an earth-colored three-pound lump of what looks like wet clay? How do “I” stay safe? I don’t, I can’t.. “I” am under attack."

"My husband is a registered nurse, so he knows the term “hypergesia”: an extreme sensitivity to touch which causes excruciating pain. A steadying hand on my shoulder feels like a thuggish wrestling hold and I wrestle back. I know what it’s like to be a small lizard curled up in a comforting ball inside a warm mud pit. Hands come to wrest me out of it and I’ll fight back. I hear their voices from far away. The nurse sounds irritated, my husband apologetic. “It’s the hypergesia,” he says, trying to smooth things over, trying to make a good impression for me I can’t believe him. He’d let his throat get cut before he’d have an awkward social moment. Me, I have only one reflex; fight back, don’t let them. Whatever they are trying to do to me, don’t let them. I’m not upset, just ready to kill or die, these being my only logical options."

"Was it Justice Kavanaugh’s vote to hear the Ramos case that broke the logjam and enabled the court to grant review? We may never know. But from the multiple opinions, including his, it’s clear that what this case was really about was precedent: when to honor it, when to discard it and how to shape public perceptions of doing the latter. Justice Kavanaugh’s 18-page concurring opinion, which no other justice joined, included a list of 30 of “the court’s most notable and consequential decisions” that overturned earlier rulings — a kind of “30 ways to leave your lover” inventory of decisions that occupied the ideological spectrum from Brown v. Board of Education to Citizens United.

At the beginning of this column, I referred to the Supreme Court “in crisis.” What stands revealed in this puzzling bundle of opinions is not so much a court as nine individuals in pursuit of agendas far removed from the controversy they undertook to resolve. Remarkably, all nine agreed that the Apodaca decision, the continued validity of which they had recklessly put in play, had been a failure. But the real failure lies not in what the Supreme Court did in 1972 but in what it did this week, in its inability to provide a coherent answer to the question it chose to ask.

Confederacy in the ’hood - 1843

Excellent exploration of history, memory, power, and...street names. That "Lost Cause" thinking about the civil war persists doesn't so much surprise me as baffle me. But it does, and it's a shame - not only for the people who it directly burdens and oppresses but for those who believe in it unquestioningly in opposition to all facts and reason. It angers me too. If I have to explain to you why Nathan Bedford Forrest (slave trader, confederate general, first grand wizard of the KKK, and Forrest Gump's namesake) was a bad person then I'm really not interested in talking to you at all, but I guess I will because we're all here and I think we all need to get through this stuff rather than go around it.

"Jim Crow laws also forbade black people from living next to white people. So in 1923, Young built a separate town for the black residents, one he called Liberia, a city black people could run themselves. On the plans for the city, Liberia is forty square blocks and has boulevards, a large round park and a hotel. Young donated land for schools and churches. He named the streets after cities with prominent black populations, like Atlanta, Raleigh, and Charlotte, and named the park Dunbar, after the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.

But Young’s vision for Liberia was never realised. He ran out of money after a 1926 hurricane decimated Hollywood. Black residents lived in substandard housing, often in crowded tents. And soon after, Young’s street names were mysteriously changed throughout the city. In Liberia, three streets named to honour cities with robust black communities – Louisville, Macon, and Savannah – were renamed after Confederate generals who had fought to keep blacks enslaved."

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"Memorialising the past is just another way of wishing about the present. The trouble is that we don’t always share the same memories. And not everyone has an equal opportunity to enshrine their group’s memory on the landscape. As the novelist Milan Kundera has said, “the only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.” The growth of the civil war monuments peaked twice: first, in the early 20th century, when Jim Crow laws were being made, and then again in the 1950s and 1960s when the laws were being challenged. “These statues were meant to create legitimate garb for white supremacy,” historian James Grossman has said. “Why would you put a statue of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson in 1948 in Baltimore?” The street names in Hollywood themselves were probably changed at the peak of the KKK’s dominance."

Apocalypse Then (Excerpt from Jack London's The Scarlett Plague) - Lapham's Quarterly

As awful as COVID is (and it's truly awful) we're lucky to not be faced with something as virulent or misunderstood as say, Europe's multiple waves of Black Death or the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. An excerpt here from a 1912 Jack London speculative novel about a then-future plague that would wipe out most of the world offers a vision more grim than any we're yet seeing and a perfect canvas for our worst fears. I am definitely interested in reading the full novel now.

"When I arrived home, my housekeeper screamed as I entered, and fled away. And when I rang, I found the housemaid had likewise fled. I investigated. In the kitchen I found the cook on the point of departure. But she screamed, too, and in her haste dropped a suitcase of her personal belongings and ran out of the house and across the grounds, still screaming. I can hear her scream to this day. You see, we did not act in this way when ordinary diseases smote us. We were always calm over such things, and sent for the doctors and nurses who knew just what to do. But this was different. It struck so suddenly, and killed so swiftly, and never missed a stroke. When the scarlet rash appeared on a person’s face, that person was marked by death. There was never a known case of a recovery."

...

"And what had occurred in New York had been duplicated in all the other cities. It was the same in San Francisco and Oakland and Berkeley. By Thursday the people were dying so rapidly that their corpses could not be handled, and dead bodies lay everywhere. Thursday night the panic outrush for the country began. Imagine, my grandsons, people, thicker than the salmon run you have seen on the Sacramento River, pouring out of the cities by millions, madly over the country, in a vain attempt to escape the ubiquitous death. You see, they carried the germs with them. Even the airships of the rich, fleeing for mountain and desert fastnesses, carried the germs."

ggg

In your whole life you will never be more interested in watching a dude play against a computer in a 2500 year old board game than when you watch this.

"My poverty is not complete: it lacks me."

"Would there be this eternal seeking if the found existed?"

"I saw a dead man. And I was little, little, little..My God, what a great thing a dead man is!"

WesRecs

Vol. #25 - April 24, 2020