Returning to this piece in honor of Baldwin’s 97th birthday #abolitionAugust #blackaugust2021 Courting the End of the World: Heeding James Baldwin’s Invitation to take up a Dangerous Morality—“In a country where morality is too often collapsed into safety—not the protection from physical harm, not the insurance of a basic standard of life, but the false safety that is stability for markets and profitability—James Baldwin summons to us from beyond the grave to boldly practice a dangerous morality. Baldwin calls for a kind of ethical work to upend and obliterate the very structures that bind us to property and the sacrosanct patriarchal family despite their violence; that bind us to “all lives matter” when we know that black, indigenous, and Latino lives are those extinguished prematurely in spectacles of horror, in the grinding slow death of poverty, and in the death producing geographies of abandonment; that bind us to oil based futures when we know these are untenable for all forms of life on the planet. I read Baldwin’s 1961 “From Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States: One Minute to Twelve, A Forum,” his 1964 “The Uses of the Blues,” and the overall thrust of his oeuvre as calling for a dangerous morality—for the courting of the disintegration of the existent social fabric, for its replacement with unprecedented forms of social connection that include the most marginal, for the exchange of the safety of assured markets for the unpredictability of revolutionary intimacies and community. It is precisely this outlook that the occasion of the impending elections requires for us to envision and practice. It is in his words “time to create new standards,” ones that take us beyond the routinized ritual of electing the lesser of two evils which “we still refer to as the Republican and Democratic parties.’“ https://brooklynrail.org/2016/10/criticspage/courting-the-end-of-the-world https://www.instagram.com/p/CSE1sBFn4Tk/?utm_medium=tumblr