Looking Forward

Krishang Nadgauda

26^th April, 2019.

“Deep, deep, deep down I knew that dream was never mine. And I wept and I cried and I fought and I stormed, but I just knew it. I was Black. I was female. And I was out – out – by any construct wherever the power lay. So if I had to claw myself insane, if I lived I was going to have to do it alone. Nobody was dreaming about me. Nobody was even studying me except as something to wipe out.” – Audre Lorde

These words reek of desolation. Leaving behind the presumable thematic weight of Audre’s words for a moment, the words themselves appear representative of a unique cultural isolation that is never really true. Identity is secondary to human solidarity. And though it is easy for me to say so amongst other humans, hoping from class to class – social gatherings finely orchestrated by an institution – I believe that having a certain faith in solidarity and the maintenance of a certain hope of achieving it is fundamental to ever being able to grasp it.

You simply cannot light a candle without trusting the matches.

Though I’d love to dive into the truth behind Audre’s cultural ostracization – free from her agency – I feel I must nudge it towards the opposite end of the spectrum. For despair in itself is an enticing feedback loop; reveling in its strength only makes it stronger.

And so I’d like to direct Audre’s literature to what I’ve extracted from Stoicism. Something she definitely, always knew, deep, deep, deep down. It’s something plausibly repulsive, stemming from aristocrats at the apex of the intersectionality ladder some two millennia ago. Its truth however, transcends space and time. That society’s filth is cleansed first by the cleansing of the self.

Journal Entry (2/22/19)

In response to Nixon's speech:



The distinctions made between the demonstrators and non-demonstrators contradicted the common excerpts he used from the constitution like "justice for all" and "we, as Americans." Who are these non-demonstrators? Are they bystanders in the eyes of one America and heroes in the eyes of another? It is almost as if the two worlds can't seem to collide in the context of this speech. The non-demonstrators are at risk of losing their America, but wouldn't they- or wouldn't that idea imply that their America is being threatened by their neighborhood watchmen. The kids their children go to school with and the ones they don't. Where are the lines being drawn? The demonstrators have been criminalized in the eyes of the law and therefore there is no true "we" just a similarity in shared space in what is becoming a desolate social climate in need of rejuvenation.


Destine Manson

Mask on – Mask off

Krishang Nadgauda
Feb. 25th, 2019.

I’m not well acquainted with America’s political history and therefore, I do not know whether Nixon was a democrat or a republican. Not that it’s tough to decipher.

His ’68 rhetoric seems to mirror the political discourse in 2019. Politics is cyclical, of course. After a couple of unfortunate and not so unfortunate troughs and peaks, rhetoric has returned from Nixon to Trump. But can you blame a republican for governing like a republican? Do you?

The contents of Nixon’s RNC address of 1968 is what you’ll hear right wing pundits like Ben Shapiro preach on their podcasts, today. Who’s to grade them on the scale of good and evil, though? Rhetoric works much like a spring, in that the more you compress it, towards whichever side, the greater the resistance you will experience.

And I won’t be shocked if some Mitchell Jackson-like professor plays one of Trump’s speeches in class, a couple of decades down the line. Even then, black lives will continue to matter, not all white people will be prejudiced; hate will remain intangible and impossible to address.