This is not a book blog, but I seem to come here to talk about books more often than I used to. There are so many thoughts I want to hold on to, and so few opportunities to share them with people, and sometimes, of course, sharing them leaves me feeling more vulnerable than I entirely wish to feel, especially when the subject is progressive and the revelations I'm marveling over may not strike others as particularly compelling.

I've just finished reading There's a Revolution Outside, My Love, a collection of letters, essays, and poetry responding to this last year of plague and protest. I enjoyed almost all of the selections, but there were a couple concepts in particular that struck me as significant.

The first arose in Sofian Merabet's "Be Safe Out There." He points out that Americans have a peculiar way of expressing our notion of safety. That it is tied to spaces that are "out there" and to people who are not like us. That it arises, basically, from our sense of the Other: we worry we are not safe when we are near the Other. And the Other, at least on a national level, is always someone who is not white, who does not live the way or in the places white people do.

Merabet puts it much more eloquently than I can here, but while reading his words and thinking about our national reaction to that Otherness, I realized how difficult it would be break that knee-jerk defense of our safety without also reckoning with why we are so afraid of that Other.

I say "we" here in a national sense but also in a white-people sense. White people created the Other in order to exploit them, and we knew when we did it that they could and would want to fight back. That our oppression created a situation where we would always, always need to be on guard. Not just to protect our power and ability to oppress/exploit, but also to prevent retaliation against the terrible things we have done.

I'm not sure any of us who've grown up in this country, irrespective of race, are very good at detaching from this desperate clinging to safety. It's so foundational to our way of viewing the world. I think some people can see they are on the wrong side of that perception of safety—that they are considered the Other and are therefore threatened—and that allows them a certain flexibility within that grasping for safety. And I think some people can shift their notion of safety to include all people, not just their own group. But we still aren't willing to see safety as anything other than, say, a castle we're entitled to protect.

I'm not sure seeing it that way is wrong, necessarily. I think I'm too attached to this culture to see that subject from more than a handful of weak angles. But it does bear thinking about. If we are so convinced that our safety deserves unquestioning protection, then we will all struggle to see solutions beyond hunkering down and arming our defenses. Maybe there aren't other solutions. But if there are, how can we see them when we're too afraid to try something different?

The second concept that struck me arose in Major Jackson's "Letter from Burlington." He quotes Kevin Quashie's book The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture: "When allies fight for Black liberation, we are fighting for systemic change, but that systemic change is meant to protect the intimacy and interiority of Black life and Black lives [...] The part of Black life that you don't actually see, that they don't share with you is the part you must protect."

This made me cry. Because I finally had a reason why the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Elijah McClain, in particular, struck me as so terrible. Their interior life—that place of dreaming and thinking and imagining and choosing, where Ahmaud decided it was a great day for a run and Elijah sank into his music and his self-awareness ("I'm just different")—this private, personal space was assumed to be nonexistent by the people who killed them. Nonexistent or filled only with evil.

I would be hard-pressed to find something that matters to me more than my own internal world and those of everyone around me. I still struggle to feel empathy at times, but it is a foundational tenet of my personhood that other people's internal lives are sacred. That I must not trespass on their intimate space. That if they invite me into it, it is a deep and immeasurable honor. That what I see is only ever a fragment of who they are, really.

To imagine Ahmaud and Elijah—and others; I know there are others, even if I don't know their names—immersed in their hopes and goals and joys and struggles...to imagine that reduced to nothingness. Before they were killed, even. All the person-ness of them, just erased. De-souled like that, how could their loss mean anything to their killers?

Don't get me wrong: every death is an ending of that internal life. Every death carries that sadness in it. But to have your internal life denied to you, even as you're dying? To have had it denied to you not just in death, but in most of your life, too? To have had people look at you and decide there is nothing inside you worth honoring or respecting? It breaks my heart. And for Ahmaud and Elijah, at least, there's no fixing that. In the moment of their deaths, they were the only people present who saw themselves as real, complete, sacred beings.

::deep breath:: I'm still not sure I've quite managed to capture all the thoughts swirling in my mind after reading these, but at least I have this to come back to when the keen edges of these realizations have smoothed into the more well-worn windings of my everyday thoughts.