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There is a deep hostility toward Black people that transcends borders, languages, and cultures. Far too many ethnic groups have embraced beliefs rooted in anti-Blackness. What began as a white supremacist hierarchy has been absorbed, replicated, and normalized across societies around the world. This man was doing nothing more...

27,883 Aufrufe • vor 28 Tagen •via X (Twitter)

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Ali didn’t dodge, he detonated… “You’re Mad Because I’m Free”: When Muhammad Ali Refused to Shrink In 1974, just weeks after shaking the world by knocking out Joe Frazier in the aftermath of the Thrilla in Manila, Muhammad Ali walked onto The Phil Donahue Show, not as a boxer chasing applause, but as a Black Muslim man who refused permission. Facing a mostly white audience, Ali was questioned about his faith, his future, and his confidence. Then came the familiar charge: arrogance. Delivered by a white woman who bristled at his self-assurance, it was the kind of criticism Black excellence has always attracted when it refuses to bow. Ali didn’t dodge, he detonated. He named what she would not: that her discomfort had nothing to do with tone and everything to do with power. That a Black man speaking boldly to white people violated an unspoken rule. That pride in Blackness was still read as an offense. Ali didn’t plead respectability, he exposed hypocrisy. He dismantled the myth of “shared minority status,” reminding the audience that whiteness, even when foreign, still moved freely through America in ways Black Americans could not. He spoke plainly about housing, business ownership, movement, and freedom, real freedoms, not symbolic ones. And he made it painfully clear: a white woman in a white society was not less free than a Black man in Chicago. Not even remotely. What made the moment unforgettable wasn’t just Ali’s sharp tongue, it was his refusal to apologise for confidence in a country that demanded Black humility as proof of worth. He didn’t ask to be liked, he demanded to be understood. Ali knew something America still struggles to accept: when Black people speak with certainty, it’s called arrogance. When they speak with pride, it’s called a threat. And when they refuse silence, they are told to be grateful. On that stage, Ali didn’t just defend himself, he told the truth, loud, unflinching, and impossible to ignore.

Save Our Citizenships 🔻

66,334 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

Beethoven could not hear the music he wrote. At the age of 28, he realized he was no longer able to listen to a flute being played in the distance, and he spent the rest of his life composing the most enduring music in Western history in almost complete silence... He had been a working musician since childhood. His ears were everything. In 1798, in the middle of a heated argument with a singer, he noticed for the first time that something was wrong. The sound was thinning at the edges. He could hear voices, but high frequencies were beginning to disappear. He told no one for years. By 1802, the truth was no longer deniable. On his doctor's advice he moved to Heiligenstadt, a quiet village outside Vienna, hoping the country air would help. It did not. There, alone and surrounded by farmland, he wrote a letter to his two brothers that he never sent. It was found among his papers after his death. We now call it the Heiligenstadt Testament, and it is one of the most devastating documents ever written by an artist about himself: "You men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the cause of my seeming so... what a humiliation, when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing, and again I heard nothing." He wrote, in the same letter, that he had thought of ending his life. And then he wrote the line that explains everything that followed: "Only my art held me back. It seemed impossible to me to leave the world before I had produced everything I felt called upon to produce." He went back to Vienna. He went on composing. Over the next two decades his hearing continued to fade. Friends began writing their words down in small notebooks instead of speaking them aloud, and waiting while he read. Modern scholars call these the conversation books. Around four hundred of them survive. To compose, he developed his own methods. He bit one end of a wooden rod and pressed the other against the soundboard of his piano, letting the vibrations travel through his jaw to his inner ear. He had stumbled, through trial and error, onto the principle that modern science calls bone conduction. The cause of his deafness has never been settled. What we do know is this: he realized he was losing his hearing at twenty-eight, and he could have stopped. He wrote the letter, he held the thought of dying in his hand, and then he put down the pen and went back to work. Most of what he is remembered for was composed after that moment: The Fifth Symphony. The Seventh. The Ninth. The Missa Solemnis. The late quartets. All of it was made by a man who could no longer hear most of what he was writing. There are people who give the world what they receive, and there are people who give the world what they were never able to receive. The most enduring beauty in human history has almost always come from the second kind... -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: I write about beauty in all its forms. If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

James Lucas

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