Today was a scheduled day to release a podcast episode for Dispatches From Elsewhere, but with the current climate & wanting to maintain focus on the right perspectives, I'm holding off on that. Instead, I'd like to compile a small list of resources that have been useful to me right now--as a white man, as a hick, as a hopeful ally--in supporting the aims of social justice warriors to end police brutality & obtain racial equality. This is a incomplete, randomly ordered list, but I hope it'll provide some folks good avenues for recognizing, processing, & understanding the current situation & what we might do in the face of it.

Citizen by Claudia Rankine -- "And when the woman with the multiple degrees says, I didn't know black women could get cancer, instinctively you take two step backs though all urgency leaves the possibility of any kind of relationship as you realize nowhere is where you will get from here."

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo -- "To interrupt white fragility, we need to build our capacity to sustain the discomfort of not knowing, the discomfort of being racially unmoored, the discomfort of racial humility." 

"The American Nightmare" by Ibram X. Kendi -- "History is calling the future from the streets of protest. What choice will we make? What world will be create? What will we be? There are only two choices: racist or anti-racist."

DeRay Mckesson on the Bill Simmons Podcast -- Be sure to check out Mckesson's Campaign Zero, an effort to reduce the murder of civilians by police to zero.

The Daily podcast's updates 
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Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes -- "I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.​"

"The riots were not senseless" by James Brigg -- "The ensuing violence might have been unsanctioned, but it was not senseless. To the contrary, the protesters’ violence has a tragic logic. It is a frenzied outburst among people who lack power and want to force those with power to pay attention."

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander -- “The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.”

"A Small Needful Fact" by Ross Gay --
Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.