My skin is a monument

Greg Dworkin of Daily Kos, in his pundit roundup, quoted Caroline Randall Williams in the New York Times talking about Confederate monuments.

I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.
…
I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

I wrote yesterday about the rise of coronavirus cases across the South and Southwest. Mark Sumner of Kos wrote that this rise should be considered a crime.

John Stoehr asks, “Why aren’t we talking about negligent homicide?” Why aren’t we talking about what the GOP governors knew and when they knew it in their rush to reopen the economy? Stoehr compares these governors to the tobacco industry which put profits over lives for decades. These governors are also putting profit (and reelection) ahead of people. “Dead people were the cost of doing GOP politics.”

People in the top 1% view nearly everything as gains and losses. GOP governors think the rest of us do too. But we don’t. These governors may not face criminal consequences, but it looks like they will face political consequences.



In another pundit roundup Dworkin quotes Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post. The summary is simple. Economic status does not explain support for the nasty guy. Racism does.



I don’t remember who suggested this and don’t see it in my browser tabs, so I can’t give credit.

The AIDS quilt was conceived during the pandemic that killed tens of thousands of gay men. When a victim died friends would create a panel, mostly cloth, about 3x6 feet (the size of a grave), to honor and remember them. Too many victims of AIDS didn’t receive funerals because families didn’t want the social stigma of death by AIDS and because many funeral homes and cemeteries refused to handle the remains. The quilt now has 48K panels and weighs about 54 tons. It was last displayed in its entirety on the National Mall in 1996 (panels have been added since). It is the largest piece of community folk art. One of the goals of the quilt is to demonstrate how massive the AIDS pandemic really is.

Similar quilts have been created for US Armed Forces killed in the Iraq War, those who died in the 9/11 attacks, those who died of breast cancer, and a few others.

The suggestion is to now do the same or similar for COVID victims. We need something to express how massive this pandemic really is.



The Twitter feed for Henry Sotheran’s antiquarian bookshop in London (est. 1761) includes this:

The disturbing lack of time travellers arriving to stop 2020 happening suggests we never actually invent it.

Maryanne McDonald replied:

Maybe it's one of those plot lines where everything they do to stop stuff just makes it worse in an apparently unrelated way?

And Matt Hunziker added:

There are two options here:

1. Time travel is a theoretical and practical impossibility, and always will be, or;

2. Time travellers have tried their best to fix 2020, and the version we're currently enduring is the best they could do.

Both are equally terrifying.