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“...and when the land kills of its own volition,” Toni Morrison writes in The Bluest Eye, “we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.” When school boards campaign to ban the novel, as they often do, they fearmonger around its depictions of sexual abuse. In my experience, censorship isn’t often carried out honestly. More threatening to a certain way of life, anyway, are the lucid truths Morrison captures about the complexities of racism in the US. “This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers,” she writes. Though it’s often presented as a kind of natural order, the soil, the land, is of course the construction of a prevailing group—bigoted school boards, authoritarian governments. Keeping the youth away from provocative minds like Toni Morrison’s is how you maintain it. 

Black History Month is a particularly good time to reread Morrison, especially this year—because there’s quite a bit more racism in the soil than there has been in recent memory and because it’s the 100-year anniversary of celebrating American Black history (a week became a month in the ’70s). This week, two of the most provocative minds currently writing on the Black American experience are in town. Harvard professor and MacArthur fellow Imani Perry reads from her latest book, Black in Blues, at the Schnitz Thursday (7:30pm, $110+; tickets are part of a subscription series), and Keisha N. Blain, a Guggenheim fellow who teaches at Brown, brings Without Fear to the same venue Tuesday (7pm, $46+). 

The titular blue eyes of Morrison’s book are a symbol of whiteness. In Perry’s book, subtitled How a Color Tells the Story of My People, they’re matched with many blue things that have shaped or been shaped by Black culture—white abolitionist Josiah Wedgwood’s blue jasperware ceramics, Miles Davis’s Blue Period, blues music—flipping the introspective conceit of books like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and William H. Gass’s On Being Blue into a poetic anthropological study of race. Per The New York Times, Perry’s prose “swirls and flicks like an actual marble.”

Blain’s book is a more direct social study. Marginalized doubly by sexism and racism, Blain argues, Black women in the US are “uniquely positioned to combat injustices.” And she backs up her claim. Blain expands NAACP cofounder Ida B. Wells’s legacy past her anti-lynching and anti–Jim Crow activism—“readers will likely be surprised to learn that she also wrote critiques of the Armenian genocide and the imperialist impulses behind the United States’ invasion of Cuba at the beginning of the Spanish-American War,” writes the Los Angeles Review of Books. Wells also gave speeches in Britain to spread word about America’s horrific lynchings. In a similar effort, Mary Church Terrell spoke to the International Congress of Women in Zurich in 1919 about how peace after World War I was impossible while racism endured.

Blain’s major conceit is that, because of this unique perspective, Black American women have long advocated for human rights, which don’t change based on geography, as opposed to civil rights, which do. If you extend the conversation about “unalienable rights” and of all people being “created equal” to include all people in the world, that is, there’s no question about who counts as three-fifths of a person, or at all.

More things to do this week

Elsewhere...

• Wynne rapping over SZA’s “Snooze” at Chess Club. (YouTube)
• A photo essay collecting months of images from ICE protests by Portland photographer Rian Dundon. (Mother Jones)