Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 46.3 of Digestable, your thrice-weekly mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
Today’s news, fermented:
When reading the discourse about the January 6th riots—like most discourse about most civil unrest—it’s pretty easy to tell where the white people are.
The rallying cry of ‘liberals,’ as they are known, is horror that this (whatever it was: the National Guard hauling away protestors in Portland, tear gassing moms, etc; white nationalists storming the nation’s *precious* capital building) could simply not be happening here, and that if in fact it was, well, then the whole world was losing its mind.
It is a mark of whiteness—and inherently, naivete—to believe that the state doesn’t threaten, torture, and kill people to advance its interests, and that it doesn’t have a long history of turning to armed militias for defense.
I bring this up today because for one, it’s always relevant that the state coddles some people while murdering others, and for two, I had the honor of going to an amazing gala last night. The goal was to raise a few hundred thousand dollars to save Fred Hampton’s childhood home.
Fred Hampton was a radical Black leader who quickly rose to prominence in the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s. The US Government identified him as a threat, planted sowers of doubt and discord in the BPP and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to dismantle the groups’ growing power, and then murdered Fred Hampton in his home.
The state—which of course received no punishment from itself for murdering a Black organizer in his home as part of a coordinated effort to dismantle Black power groups—was banking on the idea that white people would look the other way at this egregious abuse of power. They were right.
Today, there is a movie coming out, produced in deep consultation with the surviving family of Fred Hampton, that will bring this story into the public eye in a new way. You can watch it here.
If you do take time to absorb this product of Black wisdom and survival in the face of state-sanctioned murder, donate to save the Hampton house. It’s not just a house—it’s the place where Fred Senior took his last breaths at the age of 21. And, white people, it’s not just a donation—it is a rejection of the status quo in which millions of white Americans turned a blind eye to this murder. This horrible thing, it did happen here.
(via)
Caro's Advice Corner
Back next week!
DJ M0RO’s low-key Music Show
A rundown of some favs this week:
**Music: Absolutely freaking out over Love Is Back by Celeste, a for-sure to get you dancing in your kitchen. Completely taken with this energy and truly don’t know what rock I was living under before listening to this gem of an artist. Not Your Muse out now.
Raveena’s new single Tweety is sweet and groovy, I’m always so taken with her super casual/dreamy/sexy bops, and I hope this means we’re getting more new music from her soon.
**Pod: Las Culturistas has incredible host chemistry, with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang serving us All. The. Energy. with every pop-culture obsessed episode. You don’t even need to have a stake in the bits of culture picked apart - they make it funny and relevant. My favorite thing they ever did was make a list of the “top 200 moments of culture” and spend three episodes getting too drunk to finish the list because of all the side rants, and eventually ending emphatically on a unanimous agreement of moment number one: John Travolta mispronouncing Idina Menzel’s name at the Academy Awards. This week: "The Britney Episode," because of course.
**Tv: Inspired by all the truly warm and helpful quarantine advice offered by Caro, I’m adding watch recs for those of us getting lost on the Internet trying to distract ourselves with streaming. The anti-capitalist in me resists, but at the end of the day watching a great show is really quality self care.
So I was sad when I got to the last episode of High Fidelity and realized it was over. Just like the book it was based on (as well as, of course, the classic movie) it feels like the middle of the story when it ends. But such is life - and that bittersweet reality, mixed with a fourth-wall-breaking narrator (Zoe Kravitz slays) on a journey to discover the truth about the nature of her heart, really strikes a chord. Use a throw-away email to get a month trial free to at least make watching a lil subversive ;)
*Hot Goss*
Brought to you by the superb Latifah Azlan.
I have nothing much to report today so I'll let Dionne Warwick write my column for me.