This academic year, I have been working with three Black women on their university applications to try to give them the help no one gave me. One woman has not yet applied as she is a mature student juggling kids and a busy life; it will take time working through things with her. Of the other two, one got into all but one of her chosen undergraduate courses, and the other just recently received an offer from Cambridge to do her masters. We are both elated. She and I met yesterday (so far all our coaching / feedback sessions have been via FaceTime) and the first question she asked me was: why am I not a Professor? That is a simple enough question but the answer is complicated, and it reminded me of this half-written blog on class in the academy. So, time to finish.
I was thinking last night: when did censorship become a ‘good thing’? (I am obviously not talking about a ‘good thing’ from my perspective.) I am trying to remember: was it because of Trump? So much of this time calls me to remember before. Before, when we used to explore difference. When it was okay for one of these things to not be like the others. When we all wanted to be free and to discover the limits of ourselves and the world; because that’s what art means, and all of us were, one way or another, artists. We all wanted to set ourselves free, to liberate ourselves through a newness and an embracing of the unknown. In those days, we would celebrate the artists who had gone before us, those who had paved the way for a bigger world, a world a little bit freer from the conservatism of the
I was thinking recently, how lucky I am that the only time I encounter covid related nonsense is online, for instance if I make an increasingly infrequent visit to a ‘news’ website. Whilst covid is very much real for those who remain vulnerable to it (since the drugs don’t actually work), for the rest of us in London at least, real world covid has long gone. Except, it hasn’t. I am increasingly noticing an enhanced layer of censorship and surveillance in everyday life which was not there pre-covid. Worse, these organisations are attempting to redefine reality by insisting that the censorship and surveillance is something other than what it is. They try to couch it in terms of being good for me, of protecting me from some form of risk or harm. That might work on an idiot, but not me. My superpower is to see through to the truth of
When I was about 25, I was hit by a car when riding my bike which resulted in a dislocated right shoulder. Because I was 25, I popped that shit back in myself. I’m not mad at that part; dislocated shoulders hurt like fuckeries and popping it back in (mostly) stopped the pain. What I am mad about, is that I never sought treatment to help my shoulder recover. Never sought treatment, that is, until about ten years later when I started to suffer almost constant pain in my shoulder, anterior and posterior, which subsequently spread into my neck. Not only was I suffering almost constant pain, but I started to suffer a progressive weakening in that shoulder that eventually resulted in an inability to do pushups and means that I have been chasing “more than one pull up” for a decade. When particularly bad, I wasn’t able to pour a
Liberal Americans are going apoplectic because another state has made abortion illegal. Reading the comments of those “shocked” by it, is to encounter some of the most profound cognitive dissonance I have observed in a while. The right to abortion hinges on the right to bodily integrity. What precisely did this dumbest of countries think would happen when it ran roughshod over that most crucial and fundamental of human rights by mandating vaccines? Human rights are hard lines. You do not cross them. Once you do, they cease to be rights and become perspectives. And look what happens when people don’t share yours. You reap what you sow.