I do not know what to expect from this reading, as I have never engaged in these materials before. However, knowing these materials will be engaging with the topic of how black slave history has followed black people til now, I do have some questions. What is a day in the life of a black person, whose history consists of oppression and enslavement? Are there solutions to the problem of black inequality? What is the best way to go about changing society? Is it not to change it all?

After engaging in the material, there are a lot of fascinating points and connections I’ve made that are able to answer my questions above. In the piece, “In the Wake,” Christina Sharpe talks about how black folks are living in the wake, that is, living in the disturbance left behind from the days of slavery. She says in her piece, “In the wake, the past that is not past reappears, always to rupture the present.” I found this quote really interesting because Sharpe is rejecting the idea of having a “past.” Human nature likes to think of the idea of “starting over,” or a “clean slate.” Even small things such as moving to a new school, you can leave your old reputation behind and choose a new path. However, if you apply what Sharpe is arguing in life, a new start is not possible. The past not only makes you who you are, but shapes everything around you, including present society. In my opinion, although I agree with this statement to a large degree, this mentality can be almost toxic to human kind. If we go through life thinking that the past will never be the past, we are not only never able to live in the moment, but rather we will travel backwards in time, and make decisions based on the past. And in fact, this idea is evident in our current society: slavery has taken new forms in current day society, such as mass incarceration, poverty, lack of health and education, and many other things that have been discussed in other works we have read, such as the New Jim Crow. In this case, it has in fact “ruptured” the present.

In the podcast, “Episode 4: Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments Book Launch,” there were also some quotes that struck me. The first quote was “Love is like a faucet, once you think you have it, it goes away.” I thought this quote had some unanswered questions to it that were interesting to think about. The first being is the quote referring to the water coming out of the faucet? If so, who is turning off the water, i.e. making the love go away? Is it society? Insitutions in the society? White supremacy? History? All of the above? The second being why a faucet? As I was thinking about this, I decided to start by looking up the exact definition of a faucet: a device by which a flow of liquid or gas from a pipe or container can be controlled. Making the connection back to the metaphor of a wake behind a boat being a disturbance to the water flow, so is turning off the water flow from a faucet. There is a lack of love and respect for black people in society, as they are still living in the wake. Another part of the podcast that struck me was when Hartman says during the question and answer portion that a worried thought in her head was that she was going to die with white supremacy still being alive. This idea connected to the “In the Wake” piece when Sharpe says that black people are said to be able to endure more pain, so she had to work to make sure her brother Stephen was going to die comfortably in the hospital. For Hartman, dying with white supremacy alive is dying with pain. She will be dying uncomfortably. The entire black community is fighting for their lives in order to die a comfortable death: a death in which they died knowing they had won respect and equality.