Soon Come…
"Unphased": The first exclusive essay from Robert Jones, Jr. for paid subscribers of WITNESS.
Hello Family,
I’ve been listening to singer/songwriter/producer Arin Ray’s latest album, Phases III and it sparked in me a need to think and write about it. What started out as what I thought was going to be a simple music review turned into a kind of treatise on what it has meant to live and move in this particular kind of body—a Black man’s body—in the arts and in the world, and the extensive damage white supremacy, capitalism, and especially patriarchy wreaks on it.
“Unphased”—which I have been working on since October 2023, in the midst of great personal tragedies and upheavals—is an attempt at truth, love, and reconciliation; an airing out of a peculiar wound so that it might have a chance at a specific kind of healing. I imagine that this will likely be interpreted as something else entirely, though; and that makes me sad. But I have no control over that. In any case, it’s inspired by and dedicated to someone I love very dearly.
This longform essay will be the first exclusive for paid subscribers to Witness. If you are interested in subscribing, please select from the options below.
I will still be posting free content, of course. But some of the longer pieces I write will only be available via a paid subscription.
So stay tuned for “Unphased,” a love letter, coming on Valentine’s Day. ♥️
Until then, here are some reading recommendations for you. Please support literary artists. Science confirms that reading (particularly reading fiction) is one of the ways human beings can maintain and cultivate their humanity. So read on, my people!
Books
This Great Hemisphere by Mateo Askaripour
“From the award-winning and bestselling author of Black Buck: A speculative novel about a young woman—invisible by birth and relegated to second-class citizenship—who sets off on a mission to find her older brother, whom she had presumed dead but who is now the primary suspect in a high-profile political murder.
Despite the odds, Sweetmint, a young invisible woman, has done everything right her entire life—school, university, and now a highly sought-after apprenticeship with the Northwestern Hemisphere’s premier inventor, a non-invisible man belonging to the Dominant Population who is as eccentric as he is enigmatic. But the world she has fought so hard to build after the disappearance of her older brother comes crashing down when authorities claim that not only is he well and alive, he’s also the main suspect in the murder of the Chief Executive of the Northwestern Hemisphere.
A manhunt ensues, and Sweetmint, armed with courage, intellect, and unwavering love for her brother, sets off on a mission to find him before it’s too late. With five days until the hemisphere’s big election, Sweetmint must dodge a relentless law officer who’s determined to maintain order and an ambitious politician with sights set on becoming the next Chief Executive by any means necessary.
With the captivating worldbuilding of N. K. Jemisin’s novels and blazing defiance of Naomi Alderman’s work, This Great Hemisphere is a novel that brilliantly illustrates the degree to which reality can be shaped by non-truths and vicious manipulations, while shining a light on our ability to surprise ourselves when we stop giving in to the narratives others have written for us.”
Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine by Uché Blackstock, MD
“The rousing, captivating story of a Black physician, her career in medicine, and the deep inequities that still exist in the U.S. healthcare system.
Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organization of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbors, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives.
What Dr. Uché Blackstock did not understand as a child—or learn about at Harvard Medical School, where she and her sister had followed in their mother’s footsteps, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the school—were the profound and long-standing systemic inequities that mean just 2 percent of all U.S. physicians today are Black women; the racist practices and policies that ensure Black Americans have far worse health outcomes than any other group in the country; and the flawed system that endangers the well-being of communities like theirs. As an ER physician, and later as a professor in academic medicine, Dr. Blackstock became profoundly aware of the systemic barriers that Black patients and physicians continue to face.
Legacy is a journey through the critical intersection of racism and healthcare. At once a searing indictment of our healthcare system, a generational family memoir, and a call to action, Legacy is Dr. Blackstock’s odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician—to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez
“1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn’t. By 1998 Anita’s name has been all but forgotten—certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by privileged students whose futures are already paved out for them, Raquel feels like an outsider. Students of color, like her, are the minority there, and the pressure to work twice as hard for the same opportunities is no secret.
But when Raquel becomes romantically involved with a well-connected older art student, she finds herself unexpectedly rising up the social ranks. As she attempts to straddle both worlds, she stumbles upon Anita’s story, raising questions about the dynamics of her own relationship, which eerily mirrors that of the forgotten artist.
Moving back and forth through time and told from the perspectives of both women, Anita de Monte Laughs Last is a propulsive, witty examination of power, love, and art, daring to ask who gets to be remembered and who is left behind in the rarefied world of the elite.”
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
“Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.
In a novel that is by turns shattering and wondrous, Tommy Orange has conjured the ancestors of the family readers first fell in love with in There There—warriors, drunks, outlaws, addicts—asking what it means to bethe children and grandchildren of massacre. Wandering Stars is a novel about epigenetic and generational trauma that has the force and vision of a modern epic, an exceptionally powerful new book from one of the most exciting writers at work today and soaring confirmation of Tommy Orange’s monumental gifts.”
HUM by Helen Phillips
“From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance…but at what cost?
In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called ‘hums,’ May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.
Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights’ respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.
Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, ‘Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.’”
The Rich People Have Gone Away by Regina Porter
“A diverse group of New Yorkers are brought together by the search for a missing woman in this kaleidoscopic novel of betrayal, race and human connection from the critically acclaimed author of The Travelers.
Brooklyn, 2020. Theo Harper and his pregnant wife, Darla, head upstate to their summer cottage to wait out the lockdown. Not everyone in their upscale Park Slope condo building has their privilege: not Xavier, the teenager in the Cardi B t-shirt, nor Darla’s best friend Ruby and her partner Katsumi, who stay behind to save their Michelin-starred restaurant.
During an upstate hike on the aptly named Devil’s Path, Theo divulges a long-held secret—and when Darla disappears after the ensuing argument, he finds himself the prime suspect. As Darla and Theo’s families and friends come together to search for her, with Ruby and Katsumi stepping in to broker the peace, past and present collide with startling consequences. For many brought back into the fold by Darla’s disappearance—even those glimpsed fleetingly in the building lobby—it is a chance to renew connections or to review distances: what brings them together, and what sets them apart.
Set against the pulse of an ever-changing city, The Rich People Have Gone Away connects the lives of ordinary New Yorkers to tell a powerful story of hope, love, and inequity in our times—while reminding us that no one leaves the past behind completely.”
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
“From the celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age comes a fresh and provocative story about a residential assistant and her messy entanglement with a professor and three unruly students.
It’s 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie’s starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardized by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks, and illicit intrigue.
A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption, and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior—and the highly anticipated new novel by acclaimed and award-winning author Kiley Reid.”
Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human by Cole Arthur Riley
“For years, Cole Arthur Riley was desperate for a spirituality she could trust. Amid ongoing national racial violence, the isolation of the pandemic, and a surge of anti-Black rhetoric in many Christian spaces, she began dreaming of a more human, more liberating expression of faith. She went on to create Black Liturgies, a digital project that connects spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black memory, and the Black body.
In this book, she brings together hundreds of new prayers, along with letters, poems, meditation questions, breath practices, scriptures, and the writings of Black literary ancestors to offer forty-three liturgies that can be practiced individually or as a community. Inviting readers to reflect on their shared experiences of wonder, rest, rage, and repair, and creating rituals for holidays like Lent and Juneteenth, Arthur Riley writes with a poet’s touch and a sensitivity that has made her one of the most important spiritual voices at work today.
For anyone healing from communities that were more violent than loving; for anyone who has escaped the trauma of white Christian nationalism, religious homophobia, or transphobia; for anyone asking what it means to be human in a world of both beauty and terror, Black Liturgies is a work of healing and empowerment, and a vision for what might be.”
Articles
The White Inevitability of Donald Trump: “The resurgence of Trump as the Republican standard-bearer in the 2024 presidential race is less a surprise and more a confirmation of an enduring truth: America, in its persistent journey, has always hesitated — if not outright refused — to hold white supremacy and its purveyors accountable. The spectacle of Trump's return, or rather his continuity, is not an anomaly but a white inevitability. A reminder that white bigotry is not only protected, it is lauded.”
Trump Isn't Unfit Because He's in Mental Decline: “He's unfit because he's a fucking fascist.”
New York City designates social media a public health hazard: “Companies like TikTok, YouTube, Facebook are fueling a mental health crisis by designing their platforms with addictive and dangerous features,” Adams said in the annual State of the City address.”
How Rikers Island Became New York’s Largest Mental Institution: “In the jails, mentally ill detainees have been subject to harsh conditions, inhumane treatment and inadequate supervision, records and interviews show. Guards have routinely failed to bring them to medical appointments or court appearances and have often left them unattended, even if they have been flagged as suicide risks. At least 18 mentally ill detainees have died by suicide, drug overdoses and other causes in the past three years alone. One man with a history of psychiatric hospitalizations had missed 26 medical appointments in seven months when a guard left him unattended in March 2021. He wedged his head through his cell’s food tray slot, asphyxiating himself.”
Why Namibia invoked a century-old German genocide in international court: “‘On Namibian soil, #Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904-1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions,’ Namibian President Hage Geingob said in a press release posted Jan. 13 on X, formerly Twitter. “The German Government is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil.”
Online racism is linked to PTSD symptoms in Black youth, study finds: “Mounting evidence shows the devastating toll online racism takes on Black youth. According to a study published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, Black children and teens who experience racial discrimination online may develop symptoms related to post-traumatic stress disorder. Those PTSD symptoms, the researchers found, were also potentially linked to suicidal thoughts.”
Today’s Teenagers: Anxious About Their Futures and Disillusioned by Politicians: “‘Young voters, while they’re very issue oriented, they’re not specifically tied to either party and they think the entire political system is failing,’ said Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research Partners, a Democratic polling firm, and another pollster behind the new survey.”
It's Movement Time: “Alongside the strong men who want to destroy all of us, are the nice white ladies who help them implement their fascist regimes, here and around the world. In the U.S., a majority of white women have voted for the Republican party for decades. And, white women are at the vanguard of bringing the Heritage Foundation’s misbegotten agenda to the world, like Sharon Slater who leads the dangerous ‘Family Watch International.’ In Uganda, after Slater met with the PM, the Ugandan government installed anti-LGBTQ legislation. This isn’t, as many people claim, these women ‘voting against their own interests.’ Their votes and activism are in the service of whiteness and upholding white supremacy.”
Brazil Embraces Its Black Roots: “Racism has long existed in the shadows in Brazil, home to the biggest Black and mixed-race population outside of Africa—almost 120 million people. There was never a ban on mixed-race marriage as there was in the U.S., nor an apartheid system as there was in South Africa. For years, Brazilian leaders promoted the idea of ‘racial democracy,’ presenting theirs as a society where people of all skin colors mixed harmoniously. But the reality has always been very different, Black-rights activists say.”
VOTE NOW in the NAACP Image Awards! The ceremony will air on March 16, 2024, live at 8 pm ET/7 pm CT on BET and CBS.
People who grew up reading a lot of fiction books usually have these 7 unique traits: “Want to know a secret about book lovers? People who grew up reading a lot of fiction books have some pretty awesome traits that set them apart from the rest.”
I hope your new year, for those who celebrate this as a new year, is off to a fantastic start.
Blessings upon blessings,
Robert