Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 11: Your Reckoning With The Machine
In Chapter 11 of the series, Chisom turns the diagnosis onto the reader and refuses the question they arrive with. “What can I do to fix this?” is a trap, because its only honest answer is that you cannot, and the despair is what the structure needs. She replaces it with the question that cannot be escaped, “what am I going to do given that I cannot fix it?“, and closes the three exits, paralysis, heroism, and purity. Then she goes first, Nigerian and Norwegian, extracted-from and beneficiary, paid by the institutions she indicts, refusing to resolve whether that makes her the leverage or the alibi. From there come the three questions she hands the reader, identity, context, and power clarity, and the ask that follows, which is smaller and harder than anyone wants: stop laundering it. The structure does not run on monsters. It runs on ordinary people doing ordinary jobs and declining to look at what the job is for. It ends without comfort and without despair, on the fact that you will probably not see this work finished, that it works anyway, slowly, and that the better world does not make itself, it gets built by ordinary people making ordinary decisions, pointed in the direction of a safer and more dignified world for all.
With Chisom Udeze, Solo
Listen On
Show Notes
In Chapter 11 of the series, Chisom turns the diagnosis onto the reader and refuses the question they arrive with. “What can I do to fix this?” is a trap, because its only honest answer is that you cannot, and the despair is what the structure needs. She replaces it with the question that cannot be escaped, “what am I going to do given that I cannot fix it?“, and closes the three exits, paralysis, heroism, and purity. Then she goes first, Nigerian and Norwegian, extracted-from and beneficiary, paid by the institutions she indicts, refusing to resolve whether that makes her the leverage or the alibi. From there come the three questions she hands the reader, identity, context, and power clarity, and the ask that follows, which is smaller and harder than anyone wants: stop laundering it. The structure does not run on monsters. It runs on ordinary people doing ordinary jobs and declining to look at what the job is for. It ends without comfort and without despair, on the fact that you will probably not see this work finished, that it works anyway, slowly, and that the better world does not make itself, it gets built by ordinary people making ordinary decisions, pointed in the direction of a safer and more dignified world for all.