s.u.t.a.kool...

Southside, Chicago: the sun rose and set against the backs of me and my five siblings as we played in our front yard: building cardboard forts and chalk-writing stories on the cracked concrete. Throughout grade-school and high-school, I filled a parade of notebooks with detailed lies about the imagined lives of fictional strangers, creating even more life with my notebooks than my mother had with her body. Years later, I moved to Galesburg, IL, where I earned a BA in Creative Writing. After living in Harlem for five years, I recently relocated to Chicago. I've written for more than half-a-dozen publications. I want to be your MidWest Issa Rae, your Black Helen Feilding. http://nicoleakoukou.com -- Nicole Akoukou Thompson

[parkeraul]

🔘 i’m in this and i don’t like it

[anxietyproblem]

[ithelpstodream]

[sutakool]

The world coarsened and hardened, and then it burned. It ended. The earth (as I knew it) took its last breath, and its residents wiped its face with a

This poem was inspired by a disturbing dream, which showed me the day after I died due to nuclear war.  --I’m never too old for angsty poetry.

[sutakool]

“This notion—raceless antiracism—marks the modern left, from the New Democrat Bill Clinton to the socialist Bernie Sanders. Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.” -Ta-Nehisi Coates

[sutakool]

“But if the bargain protected white workers from slavery, it did not protect them from near-slave wages or backbreaking labor to attain them, and always there lurked a fear of having their benefits revoked.”  -@tanehisicoates  via @theatlantic

[sutakool]

“The descendants of indenture would enjoy the full benefits of whiteness, the most definitional benefit being that they would never sink to the level of the slave.”  -@tanehisicoates  via @theatlantic

[sutakool]

Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed.”  -@tanehisicoates  via @theatlantic

[sutakool]

The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of.”  -@tanehisicoates  via @theatlantic

[sutakool]

To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life.”  -@tanehisicoates  via @theatlantic

[sutakool]

The focus on one subsector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition.”  -@tanehisicoates  via @theatlantic

[sutakool]

“By his sixth month in office, embroiled in scandal after scandal, a Pew Research Center poll found Trump’s approval rating underwater with every single demographic group. Every demographic group, that is, except one: people who identified as white.”  -@tanehisicoates  via @theatlantic

[sutakool]

“From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to nascar dads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant.”  -@tanehisicoates  via @theatlantic

[sutakool]

“Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic.”  -@tanehisicoates  via @theatlantic

[sutakool]

“...Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker.” -@tanehisicoates  via @theatlantic

[sutakool]

“The racial and ethnic isolation of whites at the zip code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.”

[sutakool]

“Asserting that Trump’s rise was primarily powered by cultural resentment and economic reversal has become de rigueur among white pundits and thought leaders.” -@tanehisicoates  via @theatlantic