Heard this great interview yesterday with Professor Phillip Atiba Goff.

It was this paragraph I was thinking about today:

GOFF: Yeah, and that’s a good thing because in this moment when we’re talking about defunding the police, I think we forget that it was a much quieter movement to defund schools in Black and brown communities and to defund mental health and to defund jobs and to defund architecture and parks. We’ve defunded every darn public good where Black and brown people live, so much so that policing is usually the only public good that we find. So part of the movement right now in terms of how municipalities are working is from defund to refund. These are dollars that should have been going to the community in the first place to prevent the sets of things that have people calling 911.

Getting harder and harder in class. Tried to use these two pieces today:

How a teenager’s video upended the police department’s initial tale
From the article, we read the report and then discussed what the necessity of recording, of witnessing, or documenting the world.

Then I tried to use the closing paragraphs of this article to talk about the process of doing history. Will order this book soon.

One of the things that makes this slender book stand out is Gordon-Reed’s ability to combine clarity with subtlety, elegantly carving a path between competing positions, instead of doing as too many of us do in this age of hepped-up social-media provocations by simply reacting to them. In “On Juneteenth” she leads by example, revisiting her own experiences, questioning her own assumptions — and showing that historical understanding is a process, not an end point.

“The attempt to recognize and grapple with the humanity and, thus, the fallibility of people in the past — and the present — must be made,” she writes. “That is the stuff of history, too.”