Relocated Monuments to the Victims of the Current State of Violence

Welcome back to A Curriculum of Imposters (Here & Now; There & Then; On & On). It is Friday September 12th, 2025 and I am your host Richard Finlay Fletcher. Rather than trascribe the radio show I created today as a post here, I ask those of you who are reading this to take the time to listen instead (click on the play button below).

As you listen, look below, at the photo, the text and the video, and reflect on the question of our own roles in our modern condition, our current state, of violence and its true victims. In doing so, consider what you can offer by way of healing, extended both to victims and perpetrators of violence, the colonized and the colonizer, that could, speculatively and realistically, enact what Denise Ferreira da Silva (in her essay ‘Unpayable Debt’) calls ‘an ethico-political program for decolonization, that is, the return of the total value expropriated from slave labor and native lands.”

Thank you for listening!

We know that we, the Blacks, and not only we, the Blacks, have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is greed, whose only god is profit. We know that the fruits of this system have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know that the system is doomed because the world can no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have. And we know that, for the perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly brutalized, and have been told nothing but lies, lies about ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love, life, and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in hell.
        The enormous revolution in Black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and Black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.
        If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night. Therefore: peace.

Brother James
November 19, 1970

– James Baldwin from ‘They Will Be Coming for Us Tonight: Letters by James Baldwin and Angela Y. Davis, with an introduction by Laura Preston’, South as a State of Mind [documenta 14 #4, Fall/Winter 2017], edited by Adam Szymczyk and Quinn Latimer, magazine founded by Marina Fokidis.