Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Early on, I guess shortly after college, I learned I could not save the world, though I felt passionately that so much needed my attention, our attention: homelessness, discrimination against immigrants, income disparity, LGBTQ rights, climate injustice.

I believed in that strand of Black culture, and American music and art, that sought to make a difference. Bob Marley, Nina Simone, Faith Ringgold, and many others, fed my spirit and youthful idealism. My showing up at a rally protesting police brutality, or holding poetry workshops in homeless shelters for children, or in prisons for incarcerated youth, was acting on values of responsibility and fairness.

Like many, my upbringing also inculcated a strong sense of care and service. I am the recipient of such compassion and goodwill from people who understood quite clearly the challenges I faced as a human and member of the Black underclass. Elders, teachers, coaches, even college administrators, return to me now as angels.

Those humane folks exhibited love and what we called back then “a consciousness.” They modeled an essential aspect of existing that is vital to any community who, as Dr. Martin Luther King phrased it, “are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality . . .” where “[w]hatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” I often wonder: how do we really learn to put into practice kindness and charity?

Although I still carry that sense of purpose into adulthood, it became important for me to not become exhausted nor jaded. All those marches and protest lines can shade one’s worldview and sense of humor.

Today’s powerful poem interrogates some of the reasons apathy reigns, especially when it comes to correcting historical wrongs. Through a dramatic monologue, it calls out the culture of indifference and lack of care we sometimes exhibit toward those most in need of our compassion and sense of justice.

A Statement from No One, Incorporated
by Justin Phillip Reed

“what is it when a death is ruled a homicide but no one is
responsible for it”—Hanif Abdurraqib

We are not responsible. We have not
the capacity to respond, cannot take 
your call, are not obliged. We promise
nothing in return except that we will
return, asking that the potential profit
this lost life’s labor could have produced
be accounted for, and blaming our
Black dead president for the deficit. We
are deficient and without your damage
the world is difficult work to live on.
We live on the unanswerable, assert
that acknowledgment is inartistic,
history is regressive, and aggression 
looks like no one we know. No one
is responsible while we have the luxury
to see ourselves as infinite ones, ocean
of individual possibility. We are so
many blades in the yard the wind
runs screaming invisibly through.
We need to have a deeper dialogue
about the need for deeper dialogue,
but oh oh, we are always these spondees
of speechlessness and cannot process
your request, are too busy about 
our dreams. The celestial bodies appear
from here, ripe for colonies and more 
questions. We are over earthly inquiry
and unfortunately, though your sigh
traveled light-years from the dark
matter of gravity we’re intrigued to find
you now are, we will not see you today
(we are recessed on narrowing beaches,
toasting our gods with a wellsprung red
we cannot source but are confident
the year was relatively good), but here,
for your trouble, for coming so far:

“A Statement from No One, Incorporated” by Justin Phillip Reed from INDECENCY, © 2018 Justin Phillip Reed. Used by permission of Coffee House Press.