#i can almost hear jackson delivering another confession that has the power to change lives

[kepnerandavery]

Every time I think about how Sarah and Jesse would most likely still be on greys together and serving like mad if a certain someone hadn't messed up our ship, I have to remind myself that crime is illegal 🤬

[imaginationstimulation]

I recently read A Visit From the Goon Squad written by Jennifer Egan.

This novel reads more like a collection of short stories about different characters who are almost inconsequentially related to various degrees. 

One obvious theme is about the interconnectedness of all people. 

More deeply, the book is a reflection on time and the endlessness of growing up; how our values and, more seriously, our identities change--or don’t--with time. 

These are the lines and excerpts I highlighted as I read: 

“I’m always happy,” Sasha said. “Sometimes I just forget.” (Chapter 1).

“She could tell that he was in excellent shape, not from going to the gym but from being young enough that his body was still imprinted with whatever sports he’d played in high school and college.”

“...something more than relief: a blessed indifference, as if the very idea of feeling pain over such a thing were baffling.”

“In fact the whole apartment, which six years ago had seemed like a way station to some better place, had ended up solidifying around Sasha, gathering mass and weight, until she felt both mired in it and lucky to have it—as if she not only couldn’t move on but didn’t want to.” 

“She wanted badly to please him, to say something like, It was a turning point everything feels different now, or I called Lizzie and we made up finally, or I’ve picked up the harp again, or just I’m changing I’m changing I’m changing: I’ve changed! Redemption, transformation--God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn’t everyone?”

“Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud.” (Chapter 2).

“an urge to confess the malapropism to his fourth grader.”

“As he sipped, a sensation of pleasure filled his whole torso the way a snowfall fills up a sky. Jesus, he felt good.”

“Hearing the music get made, that was the thing: people and instruments and beaten-looking equipment aligning abruptly into a single structure of sound, flexible and alive.”

“The baby he and Stephanie had nuzzled and kissed—now this painful, mysterious presence.”

“He remembered his mentor, Lou Kline, telling him in the nineties that rock and roll had peaked at Monterey Pop. They’d been in Lou’s house in LA with its waterfalls, the pretty girls Lou always had, his car collection out front, and Bennie had looked into his idol’s famous face and thought, You’re finished. Nostalgia was the end—everyone knew that.”

“Rich people like to hostess, so they can show off their nice stuff.“ (Chapter 3). 

“Hey, Lou goes. He leans down so our faces are together, and stares straight into my eyes. He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints. He goes, The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don’t listen to them—listen to me. And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.”

“I can’t tell if she’s actually real, or if she’s stopped caring if she’s real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?”

“Lou is one of those men whose restless charm has generated a contrail of personal upheaval that is practically visible behind him:” (Chapter 4, [My favorite chapter]).

“Structural Resentment: The adolescent daughter of a twice-divorced male will be unable to tolerate the presence of his new girlfriend, and will do everything in her limited power to distract him from said girlfriend’s presence, her own mascent sexuality being her chief weapon.”

“Structural Affection: A twice-divorced male’s preadolescent son (and favorite child) will embrace and accept his father’s new girlfriend because he hasn’t yet learned to separate his father’s loves and desires from his own. In a sense, he, too, will love and desire her, and she will feel maternal toward him...” 

“Structural Desire: The much younger temporary female mate of a powerful male will be inexorably drawn to the single male within range who disdains her mate’s power.”  

“These four are locked in a visceral animal-sighting competition. (Structural Fixation: A collective, contextually induced obsession that becomes a temporary locus of greed, competition, and envy.)”

“The members of Ramsey’s safari have gained a story they’ll tell for the rest of their lives. It will prompt some of them, years from now, to search for each other on Google and Facebook, unable to resist the wish-fulfillment fantasy these portals offer: What ever happened to...? In a few cases, they’ll meet again to reminisce and marvel at one another’s physical transformations, which will seem to melt away with the minutes.” 

“Structural Dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.”

“My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you?“ (Chapter 5).

“Your desultory twenties,” my mother calls my lost time, trying to make it sound reasonable and fun, but it started before I was twenty and lasted much longer.”

“The TV is new, flat and long, and its basketball game has a nervous sharpness that makes the room and even us look smudged.“

“Seventeen, hitchhiking. He was driving a red Mercedes. In 1979, that could be the beginning of an exciting story, a story where anything might happen. Now it’s a punch line.”

“...how better to mark success than by going to a place where you didn’t belong?“ (Chapter 7).

“I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away.” 

“It felt impossible, as if Jules’s excitement were being siphoned from inside her, leaving Stephanie drained to the exact degree that he was invigorated.“

“All that can be said for sure is that in the presence of Kitty Jackson, the rest of us become entagled by our sheer awareness that we ourselves are not Kitty Jackson, a fact so brusquely unifying that it temporarily wipes out all distinctions betwen us--our tendency to cry inexplicably during parades, or the fact that we never learned French, or have a fear of insects that we do our best to conceal from women, or liked to eat construction paper as a child--in the presence of Kitty Jackson, we no longer are in possession of these traits; indeed, so indistinguishable are we from every other non–Kitty Jackson in our vicinity that when one of us sees her, the rest simultaneously react.” (Chapter 9.)

“At what precise moment did you tip just slightly out of alignment with the relatively normal life you had been enjoying theretofore, cant infinitesimally to the left or the right and thus embark upon the trajectory that ultimately delivered you to your present whereabouts—in my case, Rikers Island Correctional Facility?”

“Bix and Lizzie’s apartment is tiny, like a dollhouse, full of plants and the smell of plants (wet and planty), because Lizzie loves plants.” (Chapter 10).

“It’s okay,” she says, and you know you should leave it there—it’s fine, leave it alone, but some crazy engine inside you won’t let you stop:”

“He has an optimist’s attraction to everything new—a faith that it will enrich him, not hurt him.“

“The two of you reel away from her. Hilarity keeps you busy for several blocks, but there’s a sickness to it, like an itch that if you keep on scratching, will grind straight through skin and muscle and bone, shredding your heart.”

“We’re going to meet again in a different place,” Bix says. “Everyone we’ve lost, we’ll find. Or they’ll find us.” “Where? How?” Drew asks. Bix hesitates, like he’s held this secret so long he’s afraid of what will happen when he releases it into the air. “I picture it like Judgment Day,” he says finally, his eyes on the water. “We’ll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We’ll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it’ll seem strange, and pretty soon it’ll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost.”

“Sunsan was baffled at first, then distraught. [...] But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape.” (Chapter 11).

“...all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind.”

“...a fibrillating excitement such as he hadn’t felt for years in response to a work of art, compounded by further excitement that such excitement was still possible.” 

“A feeling,” Bennie said, rousing himself slightly from his deep recline. “That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.” (Chapter 13).

“Her confidence seemed more drastic than the outcome of a happy childhood; it was cellular confidence, as if Lulu were a queen in disguise, without need or wish to be recognized.”

“There are so many ways to go wrong,” Lulu said. “All we’ve got are metaphors, and they’re never exactly right. You can’t ever just Say. The. Thing.”

“They could meander indefinitely, these conversations...” 

[laurens-lil-fics]

Hallucinate - Matt Murdock x Powered! Reader Part 6

Series Summary: When members of a criminal organization start flooding precincts all over New York, turning themselves in, Daredevil must investigate to see what new player has them running for the hills.

Chapter Summary: Daredevil searches for answers about (Y/n)’s past while Matt tries his best to keep his catatonic guest alive.

Word Count: 2430

Warnings: angst, violence

Author’s note: I feel like I defy coulda done this chapter better, but I hope yall enjoy it! we’re nearing the end!

“A lot has been happening... hasn’t it...?”

“What have you heard, Jim...?”

Mr. Mackie cleared his throat, glancing from Matt to his handcuffs. This was the first time Matt had come to visit him in a week, and he very clearly knew something was up.

“A lot of the other guys have been talking... the details are always mixed up, from second hand sources and stuff...” He gulped, ignoring the feeling of Matt’s eye’s behind those tinted glasses, and how they seemed to burn into him as he spoke. “But... they think they caught the person they were so afraid of...”

Matt tried his best to feign confusion.

“Do you think that means it’s safe to talk to the sergeant? Tell them what you know while the others are busy?”

Mr. Mackie quickly shook his head, clearly uncomfortable with the idea. “If I say anything, they’ll know I snitched.”

“Detective Mahoney is a friend, he’s trustworthy. If you take this to him he’ll make sure you’re protected.” Matt assured his client. “The sooner you tell him what you know, the safer you’ll be... I can’t do much if you’re behind bars like this, refusing to confess.”

Mr. Mackie only stayed quiet. 

Matt sighed softly before standing, grabbing his cane from the table. “At least think about it... I just want to help you.”

“You really think Mr. Mackie is going to spill the beans to Brett?”

“If he feels safe enough, yes,” Matt grunted, struggling to steady his phone between his shoulder and his ear as he hauled his groceries up his building’s stairs. “I tried giving him some space, with any luck he’ll feel safe enough to ask for Brett.”

Foggy sighed over the phone, “And if he doesn’t?”

“Then he’ll need more convincing... I just hope for our sake he does it sooner rather than later.” Matt said, stopping just outside the door to his apartment.

Foggy went quiet for a moment. When he finally spoke up, Matt could hear the hesitation in his voice. “You mean for her sake...”

Matt bit his lip, leaning against the door. “Yeah... Yeah, I mean for her sake.”

Another pause.

“Where exactly are you keeping her...?”

“Somewhere safe,” Matt promised, “But I can’t keep this up for long, she needs real doctors, people who know what they're doing...”

“You’re sure you can’t just take her to a hospital?” Foggy asked. Something told Matt he already knew the answer to his own question.

“No... not until these people are gone.” Matt’s tone was stern, but Foggy could still sense just how tired he was. The desperation he felt to catch these people.

The two exchanged their goodbyes, and once Matt hung up he set down the grocery bags and pocketed his phone. He pulled a blindfold from his pocket once he knew no one was around and tied it over his eyes.

He opened the door to his apartment, picked up the groceries, and stepped inside.

Matt navigated through the kitchen with ease, putting away the meat and vegetables he had purchased along with the beer he knew he’d be needing at the end of the night. All he left out was a box of chicken stock, which he began preparing once everything was put in its proper place.

He served the broth and made his way towards the bedroom, stopping just outside the door and knocking, hoping for a response. After waiting a moment and hearing nothing, he went inside.

(Y/n) lay in his bed, just as still as the night he had brought her into the safety of his home. Her eyes were vacant as she stared at the ceiling, she wore the same clothes from the night she was taken; Matt hadn’t felt comfortable with changing her clothes.

Matt sat beside her and brushed her hair out of her eyes, sighing softly when she didn’t so much as twitch. He set the bowl on the nightstand and carefully moved her so she was slightly sitting up.

He began to carefully feed her the broth, listening closely to make sure she wouldn’t choke on it.

“I think I have a new lead...” he piped up. He paused, listening for anything, a shift in her breathing or a spike in her heart rate. But there was nothing.

“I’m going to try and get as much information out of him as I can... Maybe even get him to a police station.” Matt explained, taking the water bottle from beside the bed and carefully giving her small sips of water.

“I know you wanted to go about this differently... Kill Blum and be done with it... But I can bring him to justice the right way, I just need more time...” He received no response again, this frustrated him.

Matt set the empty bowl aside and took a hairbrush from his nightstand. He had some trouble taking the knots out of her matted hair, but brushed through them as gently as possible. He retrieved a warm, wet towel from the bathroom and cleaned her face and arms with it, doing what little he could to take care of her.

Once the sun set, he laid her back in bed and left to change into his suit, which had been relocated to the living room. Once in his Daredevil suit, he returned to the bedroom one last time to check on (Y/n).

He sighed deeply, noticing no change, and made his way to the window. The bedside lamp began to flicker, the sound of the electricity wavering catching his attention. 

Matt turned back to her, only to turn the lamp off.

Catching the lab technician was easy. The area around the last of the warehouses he had yet to infiltrate was surrounded by plenty of dark allies anyone could get lost in. 

The tricky part was getting him far away enough to where none of his companions could hear him scream.

Daredevil pulled the sac from the man’s head, listening as he frantically studied his surroundings. He suddenly turned back to Daredevil, screaming as his captor inched closer to him.

“We’re going to make this nice and simple for you...” he began, reaching up and gripping at the chains keeping the man poised above the ground, “You’re going to tell me everything you know about the girl...”

His eyebrows knitted together in confusion. “G-Girl? What girl?” he whimpered, struggling against the chains.

Daredevil delivered a hard punch to the gut, the technician would have keeled over had he not been restrained. 

“Play dumb with me again and see what happens... You know exactly which girl I’m talking about.” he murmured. He gripped the man’s chin roughly and forced his head up to look at him. “Start talking...”

The man began to weigh his options, and while the wheels turned in his head, Daredevil flicked on the voice recorder he had hidden behind his back. 

“S-She showed up a couple years ago... she was just a kid, know? Young, nosy...” he began, cautiously looking at the man beside him.

“Started sticking her nose in places it shouldn’t have been, huh?” Daredevil prompted him to continue.

The tech nodded, “She had this cheap camera, she was taking lots of pictures out at the docks-”

“And what did she see?” Daredevil interrupted.

He hesitated. Matt already knew what she saw, the people being taken from the docks in those black vans. But he needed the tech to say it himself.

“Bodies... lots of bodies...”

The helmet helped mask Matt’s surprise, he kept his composer as his source continued. “This was before we really knew what to do with them... ship would bring us new people, and would take the dead ones away.”

“What did you need the fresh meat for? What were you doing with them?” Daredevil took hold of the chains and tightened them around the tech’s wrists, causing him to scream and whimper in pain.

“W-we were testing something!”

“Testing what? Talk, dammit!”

“We were getting commissioned, I dunno by who, but they wanted powered people on their payroll!” he shouted, causing Matt to stop and loosen the chains, dropping the man to the floor.

“Blum was given a set budget... but he blew through almost half so quickly, he was desperate... then the kid showed up...” he wheezed, trying to squirm away while he could.

Daredevil grabbed him by the lapels of his coat and began to drag him to the edge of the building. “It’s a long way down, tell me about the experiments quick, or you’re gonna find out just how high up we are.”

He gripped the Devil’s wrists tightly, hoping it would be enough to keep him falling should he decide to let go. “We developed a serum, highly degenerative in it’s early stages! That’s why there were so many bodies for the kid to find! We were at stage 5 of testing when she showed up!”

“And you thought some college student was going to be your missing link?” he growled, pushing him closer to the edge.

“N-No no! I swear, I told Blum not to do it! But Blum was mad, he’s the one who got her on that table!” he screamed, scrambling to grab more of Daredevil’s red suit. “We didn’t realize the stage 5 serum was picky about genetic codes, little things like that we had no control over! Blum just wanted to kill her, make it hurt! We didn’t know the kid was the right fit!”

Daredevil hoisted the man up and threw him back onto the roof. He took the chains from the post they still hung from and began to tie up his prisoner. At that point, he decided to turn off the recorder. This next part would be just for him.

“And the girl...? What happened with her?” He asked, pressing his foot to the man’s chest.

“She was catatonic... for three months...” he wheezed, squeezing his eyes shut. “Then... Then one day I went to run some tests on her, and she was gone...”

Matt felt his heart drop. Three months? She was going to be stuck like that for three months?

“I have no idea where she could have gone now... Ms. Jackson, my supervisor... she used stage 3 serum on her... that and the electricity should have melted her brain...” he sobbed, the disbelief evident in his voice.

Matt swallowed the lump in his throat and hoisted the man onto his feet. “That’s probably what you said last time... and she still woke up... just hope this time she won't come looking for you, I might just let her get her hands on you.”

He dumped the man at the door of the 15th precinct, and left the tape recorder resting on his chest. Matt didn’t leave until he knew the tech had been brought inside, the tape listened to, and the tech put behind bars. 

With that kind of evidence, the police would have to investigate the company asap. Blum would be arrested, and it would be safe enough to take (Y/n) to a hospital.

This sense of victory had him returning to his apartment all too relaxed. He was an idiot to think that would last long.

Once he got close enough to his apartment, he could hear someone in his bedroom with (Y/n). The electricity in his whole building was going haywire, even the fucking billboard outside his window was fluctuating like crazy.

He broke into an all out sprint to get to his place, diving in through the window and smashing through it without a care in the world. 

The intruder, who had been pressing a pillow to (Y/n)’s face, didn’t bother moving. He probably thought he’d be able to get the job done in time before Daredevil could get up. 

Matt took hold of the intruder and threw him off the bed and away from (Y/n). Before he could even try to check for a pulse, the intruder got up and grabbed him from behind.

Matt tried his best to usher the man out of the bedroom and away from (Y/n) during their fistfight. But he was privy to this, and stayed in the room as best as he could. 

Daredevil had the upper hand until the intruder took hold of the bedside lamp and smashed it against his head. This sent Matt stumbling backwards, gripping his head in an attempt to steady himself. 

For a split second, he tried listening for (Y/n)’s heartbeat. Everything felt like it was in slow motion as he continued to fight the man in his bedroom. He didn’t remember throwing him through the wall and into the living room. All he remembered was the sound of her heart growing faint.

Matt dashed for the bed and cupped (Y/n)’s face, murmuring for her to wake up. He made a move to start pounding on her chest, but the forgotten intruder grabbed him and continued their fight.

Daredevil screamed, begged for (Y/n) to try and wake up, ignoring the part of his brain that told him yelling would do no good. 

His attention was brought back to the intruder as he earned a kick to his gut, sending Matt onto his knees and struggling to catch his breath.

The attacker made a move to kick him again, but froze in place.

The sound of bare feet stumbling against the floor sent a chill down both their spines.

(Y/n) slowly staggered out of the room, gripping the door frame to keep herself steady while she stared down her would-be killer. She lifted him, slamming him against the ceiling, then back down onto the floor.

Matt heard her fall to the floor as she pushed herself off the door frame. He wanted to make a move to help her, but instead stayed in place as she crawled towards her attacker.

She slowly straddled the man, ignoring his cries of pain as she gripped the sides of his head in her hands.

“You’re going to forget...” she whispered.

Matt flinched at the screams that followed. He thanked God once they died down, and breathed a sigh of relief once he heard the intruder’s heartbeat. 

(Y/n) flopped off of him, her breathing labored. “Red...” she began, watching him kneel beside her and hold her hand. “Get rid of him...”

Matt slowly nodded, stood up, and lifted the man in his arms before leaving out the fire escape.

(Y/n) was awake, but Blum knew to send his men to Matt Murdock’s apartment. They would be coming back soon. But this time, Daredevil would be ready.

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@sisterwinchesterwriter

[bountyofbeads]

Excellent expose on racism and how to challenge white supremcy and our ideas about racism. It's well worth the time. He is brilliant!!!

Historian Ibram X. Kendi has daring, novel ideas about the nature of racism — and how to fight it

By David Montgomery | Published

October 14, 2019 1:17 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 20, 2019 |

Ibram H. Rogers, 17, hadn’t even told his parents that he was entering a Martin Luther King Jr. Day oratorical contest. They found out after he won one of the early rounds and they got a videotape of his performance. “We’ll never forget that Saturday morning we put the tape in and watched him,” Larry Rogers, Ibram’s father, told me recently. “We were really surprised.” Ibram was a bright but underachieving senior at his Northern Virginia high school. His GPA was below 3.0; his SAT scores were just above 1000. He thought he wasn’t smart enough for college, even though he had been admitted to historically black Florida A&M University.

The Prince William County Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, sponsor of the competition, saw to it that the finale, in January 2000, was filled with pride. The MLK Community Choir serenaded the mostly African American audience of 3,000 that filled a local chapel. “It was a very proud moment,” recalls Carol Rogers, Ibram’s mother. “An awesome event.” Six students out of more than 100 contestants made it to the final round to deliver 10-minute speeches on “Dr. King’s Message for the Millennium.”

The contestants dressed like young business people — except Ibram, who wore a loud golden-brown blazer, black shirt, bright tie and baggy pants. (The fact that the public school he represented, Stonewall Jackson High School, was named for a Confederate general was one of those ironies that, in the moment, was too deep to dwell on.) For his speech, Ibram adopted the persona of an angry King come back to life to scold black youth for thinking “that the cultural revolution that began on the day of my dream’s birth is over. ... How can it be over when kids know more about Puff Daddy than they know about me? ... How can it be over when many times we are unsuccessful because we lack intestinal fortitude?” The speech swelled into a jeremiad of disappointment. Ibram paced around the pulpit as he reeled off more supposed failings of young black people: “They think it’s okay to be those who are most feared in our society! ... They think it’s okay not to think! ... They think it’s okay to confine their dreams to sports and music!”

The audience loved the message, reacting with “whoops of agreement,” according to a Washington Post account at the time. Ibram didn’t win the top prize, but, two days after the big night, a picture of him speaking was spread over three columns in The Post, with the headline: “Students Give New Voice to King’s Dream.”

Ibram H. Rogers has grown up to be Ibram X. Kendi, 37, a leading voice among a new generation of American scholars who are reinvestigating — and redefining — racism. In 2016, at 34, he became one of the youngest authors to win the National Book Award for nonfiction, for “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” — which, gushed the award judges, “turns our ideas of the term ‘racism’ upside-down.” The following year, American University recruited him from the University of Florida to join the faculty and create the Antiracist Research & Policy Center. (The very evening in September 2017 when Kendi introduced the center at a gathering of students, faculty and administrators, someone stuck cotton balls to fliers depicting Confederate flags and posted them around campus.) More recently, the crowds turning out to hear Kendi discuss his new bestseller, “How to Be an Antiracist,” have been so large that bookstores have resorted to holding readings in churches, synagogues and school auditoriums.

Kendi’s ideas — that few, if any, are free of racism; that we should confess to our own racism as a first step toward becoming anti-racist; that racism begins not with the prejudice of individuals but with the policies of political and economic power — are bracing and challenging. They also constitute a very different take on race from the speech he gave at 17. For years afterward, he had vague memories of his MLK oration, and they were troubling. The competition, he told me, had been “a pivotal moment in my life” — one that gave him the confidence to believe that he was college material after all and that his future would involve communicating ideas to a larger public. Yet he also recalled how, a couple of years ago, when he took the time to watch his performance on a DVD that his father had made, “I cringed and was completely ashamed.”

The speech, he saw, had been a litany of blame, implying that there was something wrong with young African Americans as a group and that they could conquer white racism by behaving differently. How did these perspectives get lodged in the young orator’s brain? Why did the African American crowd respond with such enthusiasm? To his chagrin, Kendi realized his own experience was a prime example of how racist ideas quietly worm their way through the culture. It also showed all too clearly how one can be anti-racist in some contexts yet sick with racism in others.

Reflecting on the shame he felt at his words, he realized that the best way to communicate his newest message would be to hold out his journey as an example. Whereas his previous book, “Stamped From the Beginning,” had been built around five historical characters — Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois and Angela Davis — he reluctantly concluded that his next book, “How to Be an Antiracist,” must be based on the errors and evolution of Ibram X. Kendi.

I think even the book got better after his diagnosis,” says Kendi’s wife, Sadiqa. “I think he was writing for his life.

“Initially, I was like, that central character will not be me,” he told me. “I’m too private. I don’t want to show all of my bones and all of my baggage and all those shameful moments that I’m still ashamed of. I don’t know — I don’t want to do that. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized: How can I ask other people to share those shameful moments, to free themselves of their baggage, to confess the most racist moments of their lives, if I’m not willing to do that, too?”

And so his work and his life have built to this moment of invitation to his readers, his audiences, America. After a precocious scholarly career spent demonstrating the depressing pervasiveness of racism, he stands uncommonly hopeful, inviting us onto a path forward. “We know how to be racist,” he writes. “We know how to pretend to be not racist. Now let’s know how to be antiracist.”

Recently, Kendi’s life and work have fused in another way, too — this one potentially tragic. In January 2018, after having drafted about five chapters of “How to Be an Antiracist,” he received a diagnosis of Stage 4 colon cancer. About 88 percent of people in that condition die within five years, he was told.

Kendi was devastated but still detached enough to fold his illness into his work. He began to make sense of racism through cancer, and to make sense of cancer through racism — essentially seeing both as diseases that can be systematically fought. He wrote through months of chemotherapy and recovery from surgery, taking naps when he was too weak to remain at his keyboard, then awakening to write some more. “I was like, you know what, I want to finish this book before I die,” he told me. Sadiqa Kendi, his wife, a pediatric emergency medicine doctor at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, kept watch to see that at least he didn’t work himself to death. “I think even the book got better after his diagnosis,” she says. “I think he was writing for his life.”

Have you noticed that almost everyone self-identifies as “not racist”? Consider: In June, responding to backlash over his fond recollections of working with segregationists in the Senate in the 1970s, Joe Biden insisted, “There’s not a racist bone in my body.” The following month, in response to backlash over his attacks on four women of color in Congress, President Trump tweeted, “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!”

Kendi has little use for such protestations, for two reasons. First, he thinks “racist” should be treated as a plain, descriptive term for policies and ideas that create or justify racial inequities, not a personal attack. Someone is being racist when he or she endorses a racist idea or policy. Second, he doesn’t acknowledge “not racist” as a category. At all times, people are being either racist or anti-racist; in Kendi’s view, “there is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist.’ ” Through his scholarship, Kendi has traced nearly six centuries of racist and anti-racist ideas. He could not do the same for “not racist.” It’s an identity without content.

All policies, even the most trivial, are either racist or anti-racist, he argues — they support equity or they don’t. A do-nothing approach to climate change is racist because climate change overwhelmingly affects people of color on the planet. Forgiving student debt and offering universal health care would be anti-racist policies because people of color are more likely to have student debt or lack health care, so those policies would lessen if not erase those inequities.

In Kendi’s analysis, everyone, every day, through action or inaction, speech or silence, is choosing in the moment to be racist or anti-racist. It follows, then, that those identities are fluid, and racism is not a fixed character flaw. “What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what — not who — we are,” he writes. In studying the history of racist ideas, Kendi has found the same person saying racist and anti-racist things in the same speech. “We change, and we’re deeply complex, and our definitions of ‘racist’ and ‘anti-racist’ must reflect that,” he told me. Those who aspire to anti-racism will, when accused of racism, seriously consider the charge and take corrective action. They will not claim to lack any racist bones. “The heartbeat of racism is denial,” he writes in his new book. “The heartbeat of antiracism is confession. ... Only racists shy away from the R-word.”

As for where racism comes from: A popular explanation for the gen­esis of racism assumes that people’s ignorance and hatred harden into racist ideas, which lead to racist policies. “But that gets the chain of events exactly wrong,” Kendi writes. From slavery to Jim Crow, from redlining to mass incarceration to the unequal distribution of government largesse, power has been the first link in the chain. Power, he argues, devises racist policies for economic self-interest and then justifies the racist policies with racist ideas of hierarchy, inferiority, necessity, greater good and otherness. These racist ideas are consumed and reproduced at large, giving rise to ignorance and hate. Stop focusing on people, Kendi advises: The smart anti-racist identifies racist policy and attacks the racist ideas justifying it.

Contemporary thinkers on race say Kendi’s approach represents a bold extension of previous work on the subject. Molefi Kete Asante, who in 1988 created the nation’s first PhD program in African American studies at Temple University (where Kendi got his doctorate in 2010), told me he recalls when Kendi returned to campus in February and presented his idea that racism begins with policies. “I remember how shocked we were when we first heard him lecture on that, and people, you know, had to go back and reread [his argument] to figure out how he does this work,” Asante says. “I think it’s a wonderful innovation. ... There were questions, and he defended himself quite well.” Kendi, he adds, “is really the ascendant African American intellectual of his time. ... He has attempted something that is in the Afrocentric tradition ... and that is: Let’s redo almost everything. Let’s look at everything and ask ourselves the question, What if we turned it upside down?”

Kendi’s contention that racist policies spur the creation of racist ideas, not the other way around, is not fully embraced by all scholars, including his doctoral adviser at Temple, Ama Mazama, professor of Africology. “I don’t think that the power of ideas can necessarily be minimized,” she says. “It would be great, like he suggests, if we want to do away with racism, we could have anti-racist policies. ... I’m not sure if it would work. ... Maybe too much damage has already been done, too much ignorance that would be very difficult to eradicate through anti-racist policies.” Still, she is proud of her “brilliant” former student: “His work is important. ... He’s also looking for solutions. It’s not just an intellectual exercise, it’s something much more than that.”

Members of Kendi’s own generation of scholars praise his ability to break through to a wider audience. It certainly helps that his writing is lyrically accessible. (Two years ago, Kendi contributed a short piece to a special issue of The Washington Post Magazine, in which he proposed an anti-bigotry constitutional amendment.) “I think it’s just astonishing that someone is able to have an intellectual history like ‘Stamped From the Beginning’ influence so many people’s thinking about understanding the undercurrents of white supremacy in the United States and its durability over such a long period of time, and then pivot to actually spending time with people to rethink the strategies of their own choices in their own life,” says Marcia Chatelain, associate professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University, who, after the 2014 police shooting and subsequent protests in Ferguson, Mo., organized scholars to develop the Ferguson Syllabus, a curriculum aimed at digging into the marginalization of black and brown communities. “Ibram represents a generation that I see myself as part of where we take our ideas in a number of places and we take the feedback from a number of audiences, and we really struggle and grapple with how our work isn’t just confined by the traditions of academia, but is really defined by its ability to resonate in people’s lives and help them to move closer to the types of worlds that people have long imagined but never realized.”

One of Kendi’s early racial memories is from when he was 7 and his parents brought him to check out a private school on Long Island where he might attend third grade. The family, including Kendi’s older brother, Akil, lived in Queens at the time, but Carol and Larry Rogers were looking to send their children to a school outside the neighborhood. It was after school hours and the third-grade teacher, an African American woman, met them at the door. Are you the only black teacher? Ibram asked with uncomfortable directness. She was. Why are you the only black teacher?

“The beauty about being 7 years old is that chances are we’re not hypocritical, chances are we’re not filled with contradictions, and chances are we see the world for what is in the world,” Kendi told me, recalling the moment, which he also describes in “How to Be an Antiracist.” He credits his parents with anchoring him at an early age with enough pride in being black to make such an observation. Both rose from poverty to the new black middle class and had been inspired by the Black Power movement of the 1960s. His mother became a business analyst for a health-care organization, and his father became a tax accountant and later a hospital chaplain. As committed Christians, they were steeped in black liberation theology. They gave Ibram piles of books from a junior series on black achievers, which he devoured.

Kendi’s mother tried to explain all this about her son to the taken-aback teacher at the school, but they ended up not sending him there anyway. Instead, Kendi went to another school, where his third-grade teacher was white, and he engaged in his first anti-racist protest: After the teacher ignored the raised hand of one of his black classmates, and called on a white student yet again, Ibram sat in the school’s chapel and refused to return to class. The principal was summoned, and his parents were called.

“We tried to raise both of our sons, Akil and Ibram, to think for themselves, and if they want to challenge authority, then they have to be willing to suffer the consequences,” Carol Rogers told me. (Akil is now an event specialist for Sam’s Club in Florida, where Carol and Larry Rogers are retired.) Such was the anti-racist path his parents set Ibram on from an early age, but it’s a deceptively hard one on which to keep your footing. “How to Be an Antiracist” takes the form of a memoir, with Kendi interspersing his experiences with analyses of types of racism that he has found in himself: ethnic racism, bodily racism, behavioral racism, cultural racism, color racism, class racism, gender racism and queer racism. It’s hard to believe one person — let alone a scholar of racism — could have encompassed so much bigotry, but that’s Kendi’s point: Anyone can.

In college at Florida A&M, he wore honey-colored contact lenses for a time, until he realized this was a form of racism, privileging a look associated with another race. He dated a light-skinned woman, until he realized what a warped sensation this was causing among some of his friends, who wished they were dating light-skinned women, too. He dropped her and vowed to date only dark-skinned women — until he realized this was an equally twisted obsession, driven by racist colorism. During another phase in college, he determined that the problem with white people was that if they were not devils, maybe they were just plain destructive by nature — until he realized judging white people as a group is as racist as judging black people as a group.

He came to see in retrospect that even his parents had sometimes strayed from the anti-racist path. Like others in the black middle class, he writes, “My parents — even from within their racial consciousness — were susceptible to the racist idea that it was laziness that kept Black people down, so they paid more attention to Black people than to [President] Reagan’s policies, which were chopping the ladder they climbed up and then punishing people for falling. ... Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy.”

Kendi is harder on no one than himself. “I arrived at Temple as a racist, sexist homophobe,” he writes of the dawn of his graduate school career. His most important mentors in shedding those views — in learning how racism, sexism and homophobia intersect — were fellow graduate students Yaba Blay and Kaila Adia Story. “I learned from them that I am not a defender of Black people if I am not sharply defending Black women, if I am not sharply defending queer Blacks,” he writes. They held court in one of the common areas during study breaks and sent him scurrying to bookshelves for works by Audre Lorde, Bell Hooks and Kimberlé Crenshaw.

“What’s so wonderful about Ibram is that even though he talks about his journey, and here he is meeting me and Yaba and he’s some kind of black male patriarch homophobe, he never gave us that reception,” says Story, an associate professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Louisville. “He said, ‘Okay, these women, if I say how I’m feeling or how I’m thinking about freedom, they’re going to challenge me. ... So let me be open enough to actually listen to what they’re saying.’ And I’m grateful for that. ... Ideological vulnerability is so important when it comes to dealing with ideas of anti-racism and intersectionality.”

In 2011, Kendi was doing postdoctoral work at Rutgers University — turning his dissertation into his first book, “The Black Campus Movement” — when he met Sadiqa, who was doing a fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine in Philadelphia. He had reached out to her on Match.com. “We both kind of ended up in online dating in the same way,” she recalls. “We just didn’t have time but still wanted to pursue meeting people. ... I saw he was younger than me and said, ‘Well, there’s no way I’m going to date this dude. But I’m a nice person, so I’ll respond at least.’ So I responded and we ended up going back and forth on Match and communicating there for a little while. After a few back-and-forth messages on Match, I thought, ‘Well, gosh, this guy actually seems really cool, pretty mature.’ So I gave him a chance.”

After they had been dating for a few months, Sadiqa and Ibram had dinner at an Asian fusion restaurant in Philadelphia. There was a big statue of the Buddha against a wall, and a drunk white man climbed up and began fondling the statue, to the amusement of his friends. At least he’s not black, Sadiqa recalls saying of the white man. Why? Ibram asked. We don’t need anyone making us look bad, Sadiqa replied.

So began an extended conversation about “uplift suasion,” another racist concept Kendi realized he needed to shed — the assumption that black conduct is to blame for white racist ideas, thus legitimizing white racist ideas about black conduct. “I realized early on that if I’m going to be with Ibram, we’re going to have some discussions on some stuff that is deep,” Sadiqa told me.

By 2013, they were ready to make plans for a spring wedding on a beach in Jamaica, which Essence would photograph for a “Bridal Bliss” feature. There was one more detail to take care of, another case of life and work merging: During his painstaking hunt for the origin and effect of every racist idea he could find, Kendi had discovered that perhaps the first racist idea — grouping all Africans as a single, inferior people — is contained in the 1453 biography of arguably the first racist, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal, who was the first European to orchestrate a slave-trade that exclusively targeted Africans. The moment is also significant because, Kendi would argue later, it marked the original case of a racist policy, created out of economic self-interest, being justified by a racist idea: that captive Africans were being civilized and saved by slavery.

The budding historian and evolving anti-racist — still known then as Ibram H. Rogers — became uncomfortable with his middle name: Henry, after his enslaved great-great-great-grandfather. He reasoned that the fate of his ancestor Henry had been set in motion by the original racist, Prince Henry. So as part of the wedding ceremony, with Carol and Larry Rogers officiating, Ibram adopted the middle name Xolani, meaning “peace” in Zulu. At the same time, he and Sadiqa took the last name Kendi, which means “loved one” in the Meru language of eastern Africa.

On a Tuesday evening in mid-August, Kendi brought his ideas to a packed crowd of 575 people invited by a local bookstore to Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn. It was the first stop on his marathon tour for “How to Be an Antiracist,” with dates scheduled through March. It also happened to be his 37th birthday, and his parents, wife and 3-year-old daughter, Imani, were in the audience. Activist and writer Shaun King was seated beside Kendi at the front of the sanctuary to lead the conversation. “Who needs this book?” King began. “Who is this book for?”

Anti-racism, Kendi said, “is recognizing how we’ve been trained, nurtured and educated in ways to be racists. How hard it is to grow up in a racist society, where racist ideas are constantly being rained on your head, and never get wet.” That’s why, he concluded, the book is “for people who think somebody else could use it instead of them. Because I know I needed this book when I was 30, when I was 25 ... and I could even still use this book today.”

He started his answers to King’s questions low and slow. As he got swept up in his argument, his voice picked up speed and gained about an octave in outrage. At one point, Imani emerged from the audience and climbed into his lap. She listened quietly until Kendi wheeled into a riff about how there are only two explanations for a racial inequity such as black unemployment being significantly higher than white unemployment: “Either there’s something wrong with black workers — [which is a] racist idea — or there’s something happening to black workers as they move into the job market” — i.e., racist policies. “Relax, Daddy!” Imani said.

The audience on this night was predominantly white, as it was on the other two occasions I watched Kendi discuss his work and sign hundreds of books: at a church in Lower Manhattan and at Sidwell Friends School in Washington. Kendi has a lot to say to the types of white people who flock to book events about racism. “I can talk all day about how endemic racism is within American conservatism,” he said in Brooklyn. “But when you look at radical thought, when you look at progressive thought, when you look at liberal thought, there are prevailing racist ideas that people are not confronting. Liberals have long made the case there’s something behaviorally or culturally wrong with black people — progressives and radicals have long made the case there’s something behaviorally wrong with black people — but that those inferior behaviors come about as a result of their oppression, their poverty, slavery. ‘Yes, they are inferior, but [it’s] because of what they’re experiencing, the racism they’re experiencing, so that’s why you need to fight racism!’ ”

Kendi calls this the “oppression-inferiority thesis” — the often well-meaning but always destructive idea that mass oppression must manifest itself somehow in defective group behavior, hence the pitiable group must be championed. In “Antiracist,” Kendi quotes abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s preface to Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative of 1845: Slavery degraded black people “in the scale of humanity. ... Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind.” Then there is Barack Obama’s campaign speech on race in 2008: “For all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it — those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations — those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future.”

I think a lot of times we think about this as the work for other people, specifically white people,” says high school teacher Tamika Golden, “and I recognize that this work is for all people.

On the contrary, Kendi told any progressives in Brooklyn who might think that way, “you assume that since the system is dehumanizing, that it is literally making the people subhuman. No. The beauty of humanity is we have the capacity and the ability to strive and thrive in the most horrible, oppressive and dehumanizing conditions. And certainly black people did that during slavery, and they’ve been doing that ever since.”

The white audience members I spoke with after the events were looking for a way to describe what they were seeing in the America of 2019. “There’s a lot of categories of awfulness going on,” said Miles Seligman, a medical coder in Brooklyn. “There’s nothing — from the message and the language and the vocabulary of this kind of book — that can’t help me understand that better.”

Moreover, the example of a black man going first in a prospective communal racial confessional — and this black man’s conception of racism as a curable condition rather than a damnation for all time — seemed to encourage white listeners to look inward. “Racism doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person,” said Jimmy Dabrowski, who took three trains from New Jersey to hear Kendi at the church in Lower Manhattan. “You have to be willing to accept it and then face the reality that anti-racism is the only way forward.” Dabrowski is a health and phys-ed teacher at an elementary school in Perth Amboy. “I’m not an activist,” he said, “but I would hope that maybe by initiating a policy change where we have anti-racism in schools — that’s the kind of activism in my field I want to push for.”

The black audience members I met were already familiar with Kendi’s work. They came clutching well-thumbed copies of “Stamped From the Beginning.” In other words, they did not need to be taught the language. Rather, they were here to heed Kendi’s call for everyone to aspire to more-perfect anti-racism.

“What led me to his work was the belief that what I offered to my students had to be more than what I was giving them now,” said Tamika Golden, a high school English teacher in Brooklyn who uses “Stamped From the Beginning” in her classes. “I needed to figure out what it meant for me to be an anti-racist and to truly work against the socialization and the feelings and thoughts I had about my own people as a group. ... I think a lot of times we think about this as the work for other people, specifically white people, and I recognize that this work is for all people.”

Anwar Abdul-Rahman, principal at a charter middle school in Brooklyn where the majority of students are black or Latino, told me Kendi’s work offered “a framework for looking at racist ideas in America. You have your segregationists, you have assimilationists, and then you have your racist ideas and then counteracting that with anti-racism and what does that look like — I thought that was just a real profound idea that even as a black man was something that I could use in my life.” He, too, finds ways to work Kendi into the curriculum.

To his publics of all races, Kendi offers the same redemptive promise. In Brooklyn, King had asked him to read a couple of pages aloud. Kendi’s voice, now sonorous and incantatory, transformed the passages into a prose poem, ending with this paragraph: “But there is a way to get free. To be antiracist is to emancipate oneself from the dueling consciousness. To be antiracist is to conquer the assimilationist consciousness and the segregationist consciousness. The White body no longer presents itself as the American body; the Black body no longer strives to be the American body, knowing there is no such thing as the American body, only American bodies, radicalized by power. "

Kendi received his cancer diagnosis just as he was focusing his writing on the role of denial in the persistence of racism — all those folks who say they are “not racist.” At the time, he was a seemingly healthy, relatively young man with no apparent risk factors. Denial was an option for him, too.

“If I would have denied that I had cancer, then the cancer would have just continued to spread and eventually would have killed me,” he told me. “I had also been thinking about, even before the diagnosis, about how important it is for Americans to stop denying the existence of racism itself. ... The fact that in order for America to survive racism, they had to stop denying racism. Then, in that moment — in that same week — I was diagnosed with metastatic cancer.”

When he felt better, he began to write new sentences — hopeful sentences — that found their way into the last chapter of the new book: “We can survive metastatic racism. Forgive me. I cannot separate the two, and no longer try. ... What if we treated racism in the way we treat cancer? ... Saturate the body politic with the chemotherapy or immunotherapy of antiracist policies that shrink the tumors of racial inequities, that kill undetectable cancer cells.”

Sadiqa told me she and Ibram had a deal during his treatment regimen. He could continue to write, lecture, run the Antiracist Center, as long as he would listen to her on the occasions she detected he was pushing himself too hard. “People heal differently, and for him, he needed to have some semblance of his life, of his work, in order to mentally have the fight that I knew he would need for healing,” she said. “Pushing and making that will-to-live larger than giving up and succumbing to something that, if you just look at the numbers, was likely to take his life.” At least once, when he had a bad fever during chemo, she ordered him to cancel a speaking trip. “He was upset, but he listened,” she said.

After six months of chemotherapy, at the end of summer 2018, surgeons removed tissue in which pathologists found no cancer cells. This past summer, his body was scanned and all looked clear. “I can’t necessarily call myself a survivor as much as I’m surviving it,” Kendi told me. “But I think I’m headed in a good direction.”

And the rest of us? What direction are we headed in? The popularity of his books and the size of his lecture crowds are signs that more and more people are willing to look inside themselves to consider their own racism. At the talk in Brooklyn, King asked Kendi where he finds hope. Kendi went through the history of anti-racist progress, then added, “In order to bring about change, you literally have to believe in the possibility of change” — just as you have to believe in the possibility of a cure. “Here I am,” he told the audience, “cancer-free.”

But for America, it’s touch and go. Racist ideas continue to kill — that’s no metaphor — as the El Paso shooter most recently demonstrated. At times, Kendi sounds like an oncologist who has seen the worst. “It’s the same case with racism,” he told me. “You have people who do not want to take America, or even themselves, through the pain of healing because they’re convinced that it’s not going to work. Which makes sense if they’re convinced it’s not going to work. But once we convince ourselves that America can never heal itself from racism, then racism will persist and, I suspect, eventually destroy this country.”

David Montgomery is a staff writer for the magazine.