We Are Always Defined From a Distance

October 28, 2016 10:24 AM

Emma Bracy's eloquent essay about her grandfather's legacy | "Imagine the minds who gave us the ability to fly, all vision and measurements and math. Flight comes from the minds of people who aren’t afraid to plummet. The kind of people who can dream what they cannot see and then, almost miraculously, conjure it into existence. We are taught that those are people like the Wright brothers. But they are also people like my grandfather... I wonder if my grandfather knew the helicopters he helped to perfect would one day be used to surveil and oppress Black and Brown bodies."
posted by I_Love_Bananas (2 comments total)

Fascinating read, thank you!

Bonus link: a less than ideal copy of Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary text The Wretched of the Earth (Archive.org - easiest to view as PDF, because it's scanned as two pages per "page")
posted by filthy light thief at 11:29 AM on October 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

“I think it was more of a passkey,” my dad said to me once. “They can do whatever they want to us if they just say they’re scared.”

I wish I knew more about her grandfather.
posted by storybored at 8:07 PM on October 28, 2016