To the surprise of no rational person: immigrants/refugees are doing better than racists claim. A lot of people wanted Germany and Merkel to fail without ever actually trying. This may come as a shock to some but the scientist running the free world in Berlin might be smarter than you.
It’s as if when obstacles aren’t put in place by paranoid tyrants, people are able to thrive. It’s a human trait, and has nothing to do with what imaginary lines you happened to be born within. If you get your sense of self or worth from what banner your umbilical chord was cut under, I don’t know what to tell you.
You’re from one planet and you’ll die on this planet. (Sincerely, your Gaianist)
680 families were destroyed in Mississippi because the descendents of Europe’s trash forgot how they got access to this continent in the first place. “We came here legally!” they cry even though the law was “GET HERE” until the 1920s when “too many” people were coming from Eastern Europe and Asia (re: Jewish and Chinese people).
Americans disgust me. We are gluttonous. We are lethargic. We are tyrannical.
We are hypocrites.
We destabilize Latin American, Middle Eastern, and South/Southeast Asian countries and then wonder why there are migrant crises. We spend 400-500 years plundering the Global South of her resources and – when we can’t directly control them through colonialism or imperialism anymore – we lockdown our borders and lie.
We tell Americans their country is falling apart because of some “other” we’ve conjured in a production studio, and we consume it faster than the sugar we’re addicted to.
No one articulated the hypocrisy of America better than Toni Morrison.
Toni Morrison is a devastating loss, but her words are more pertinent now than ever. She never shied away from having America look itself in the mirror. Some of her essays read like prophecies that came to pass.
It’s heartening to hear that she wasn’t published until she was almost 40 years old. A titan of American letters lived several lives before we ever heard her lyrics.
I’ve included some great reactions to her legacy below. If you read a piece that really touched you that I haven’t included below, please share it with me! I’d love to read it.
If you have time, I highly recommend listening to her Nobel acceptance speech shared below.
A tribute to the “beauty and power” of work by novelist Toni Morrison (Nieman)
'Rest, Toni Morrison. You were magnificent': leading writers on the great American author (The Guardian)
The Truest Eye on Love, Writing and The Greater Good (Oprah)
Toni Morrison and What Our Mothers Couldn’t Say (New Yorker)
Toni Morrison, Whose Novels Were Rooted in Black Lives, Dies at 88 (NPR)
Toni Morrison | The 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture (Nobel Prize)