We Owe Each Other Everything

The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America by Aaron Robertson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pages. 2024. Every conversation I had about Trump’s reelection struck a contemplative tone. A friend, in quiet fury, vowed to focus only on local politics moving forward. A roommate told me she’d learned what it meant to accept what she couldn’t change, before taking a distraught friend to a post-election vigil. I went to bed early as the results rolled in and woke up with a tacit internal agreement that I wouldn’t care so much about the president anymore. A few weeks later, I caught up with an ex while he was visiting from Philly. He shared a similar reaction, one of resigned acceptance rather than indignation. Then he said he’d been reading The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. “It’s got me thinking about how to build a revolution without politics,” he said. That sentiment seemed to have become the goal of most I’d encountered in the weeks after the election. No matter where they stood, they’d quietly detached from the dream of a presidency that could save us, and instead had begun...