Casey Gerald
@CaseyGerald
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author, There Will Be No Miracles Here (Riverhead Books) | The Black Art of Escape (NYMag)
Texas
Joined February 2010
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"THE BLACK ART OF ESCAPE"
finally free for all to read 🪽
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They’re moving faster to stop an uprising than they did to stop a plague now ain’t that some shit.
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not to be fake deep but the contrast between all the men we've seen on versuz & these two black women is....LOUD
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Lol @ making the woman work two jobs instead of giving her the one she deserves
NEWS: The Sanders campaign researched whether Warren could be both vice president and treasury secretary at once.
The answer was yes:
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Turns out my granny’s “skepticism” about the vaccine was just stress about figuring out how to get it. The way she ran to show me her vaxx card, and explained how a vaccine works — y’all better stop writing these silly ass articles about Black people.
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Michelle Obama sending more messages in the IG Live than she did about her Netflix special
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So...the Pope is more pro gay than our new Supreme Court justice? Got it.
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"America has always asked Black people to give everything we’ve got and then give what we don’t have. Biles’s courageous decision is helping us all build a new muscle, helping us put one simple word at the top of our vocabulary: no"
#SimoneBiles
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I want to have a big, beautiful, happy life, and let great art flow from that. I reject the idea that we need to be miserable, alone, and/or dysfunctional in order to make great work.
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I ain’t writing nothing for Juneteenth. I’m gonna be drunk on the beach in Galveston with my boyfriend. Love to the ancestors, lemme know when the reparations check arrives. Good luck! 🖤
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Trump’s praise for Kanye’s album is a great reminder to pay attention to who is hyping your work. Could be a giant red flag that you’re lost in the fucking sauce.
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american heartland got all these values and no tech support smh
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Lucille Clifton’s response to Toni Morrison’s editorial suggestions. 🥶
[from
@aracelisxgirmay
‘s intro to how to carry water]
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Do we get these in our reparations gift bag?
Apple launches limited-edition "Black Unity Collection" Apple Watch
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The most radical act we can commit is to be WELL.
The Black Art of Escape is for Us ✊🏾
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45 to the IRS the past twenty years:
“I have one dollar billl, one quarter, and two pennies...”
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"nickname" is like your other name, no? not the only name you've had since the 1930s
The Redskins will officially announce Monday that they will be changing their nickname, though no new name will be revealed yet, a source confirmed. First reported by Sports Business Daily.
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“Take care of y'all's bodies, take care of y'all's chicken, take care of y'all's mental.” is better advice than any class day speaker ever gave at Princeton or anywhere else
Princeton students aren't happy that Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch will be their senior "Class Day" speaker in June.
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.
@Simone_Biles
is not alone. More and more Black people — athletes like
@naomiosaka
, artists like
@leonbridges
&
@solangeknowles
— are refusing the terms America has offered, refusing to sacrifice their sanity, their peace, for another gold medal or another platinum album.
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if y'all mad about the juneteenth ice cream imagine how mad those 250,000 enslaved texans musta been when they found out they shoulda been free TWO YEARS EARLIER 🥴
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why does it look like I’m zooming from an interrogation room 😭 one of y’all interior decorators help meeee
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@TexasMonthly
made room for 10,000 words by a Black boy from Oak Cliff, about a Black boy from Southside Fort Worth.
& let us be 100% ourselves.
& paid well.
I call it Literary Reparations.
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Happy Juneteenth, y’all 🖤
We have a freedom on the inside that America didn’t give us and America can’t take away. ✊🏾
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me in public
wearing headphones
nothing’s playing
i just hope
they all think
i can’t hear them
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I know somebody's life will be changed — saved, even — because
@leonbridges
was brave enough to share his struggles.
I'm so glad he kept on going till' he found his joy again.
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The Great Refusal
This farmer refused to sell his land to developers so now harvests his crops in between apartment buildings...
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I really wish we'd stop filming, sharing, and consuming videos of black folks who are WORN OUT from their jobs and trying to get a few mins of REST. C'mon y'all.
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This is the real grooming in America.
Plucking promising young kids out of the “hood” (west Dallas in Eric’s case), sending them to prep schools, convincing them they are dependent on white patrons for their survival, then getting them to do the dirty work of fucking their own
The mayor of Dallas is switching parties from Democrat to Republican, he writes in the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed section
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I almost called this essay: "I Want My Juneteenth Back"
Now that Juneteenth has officially been hi-jacked, I had to remind myself what this day is really about for me, for us.
Thanks to
@nytopinion
for making space.
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I love* how Texas is like we gone get y’all dead one way or another in 2021 ok
*I find it v overwhelming and sad
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As I told
@Morning_Joe
: I’ve lived America from the bottom to the very top—from a poor queer black boy in Texas, to Yale, Harvard, Wall Street, DC, etc.
But my book, THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE, is not another “bootstraps” story.
It stands the American Dream on its head.
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i either respond to emails 30 seconds after receiving, like a sociopath, or respond a year later. like a sociopath.
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I went to Jerusalem for the first time in 2017. I am still ashamed at how ignorant I was, for so long. I am grateful for my Palestinian and Jewish friends who helped me understand. And I am very clear that what is happening in Israel is ethnic cleansing.
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What I love most about James Baldwin is how great a friend he was.
How he showed up @ Maya’s door to make her leave the house after MLK’s assassination.
How (I hear) Miles would visit St. Paul de Vence just to sit outside with him in peace.
Happy Birthday, Jimmy. 💫
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We need to stop substituting hopeful stories for justice.
My first for
@nytimes
Sunday Review.
I hope these words help us get free, and do better. 🖤
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Deep in the heart of Texas shit is getting real. You’d think the election were close.
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Dear White People:
There are Black people who have signed up to do the work of helping you be anti-racist. I am not one of them. Chances are, the Black people you’re asking for guidance & emotional support aren’t, either.
A little Google will do you a lot of Good.
🖤
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I am in Edinburgh SCOTLAND and made a pilgrimage to the artwork by Nathan Coley that inspired the title of my book, THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE.
Near tears. 😭
This is a sacred day!
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Some context on Juneteenth, which is a truly wild (even absurd) historical event:
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All I have to add is Satan was not very cute ok our boy deserves better
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.
@Simone_Biles
didn't quit. She refused. Today she stepped into a beautiful, radical, overlooked tradition: the Black Art of Escape.
#SimoneBiles
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Yesterday, my therapist encouraged me to let go of the disempowering Christian tenets I was raised on, like turn the other cheek, and get more acquainted with the Old Testament God. So. Heads up.
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Where’s the health insurance that doesn’t make you pay a years worth of rent before they cover something ?? 😩
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Every few years I reread the opening chapter of Slaughterhouse Five. Good clean true sentences that help me stop performing and just write.
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I agree 100% but and also must say don’t ever marry somebody without GOOGLING plz ok.
Meghan chose life. And I love it. She chose not to sit in the darkness of “the institution.” This truth will free so many others.
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the internet is not being overly dramatic on this situation. truly wild and sad here in Austin and elsewhere.
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hate to break the news but if you got passive aggressive energy a new phrase won't save you
Don't be *that* person who comes across passive aggressive via Slack or email. 😅
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Sometimes I even shock myself with how many new, absolutely unnecessary, ways I find to use an em dash.
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"One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now."
-Annie Dillard
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Hey Casey hope you have power and water ! Also, could you confirm that you will join ...
I mean. Wow.
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LeVar Burton is on my flight and I don’t wanna bother him but I really wanna say omg Levar I mean Mr. Burton and I wanna say thank you but Imma leave him alone
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Lol @ Twitter being like America now, absolutely fucked but kinda hard to leave
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michelle hopped in the party and dnice started hyperventilating that was so cute
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how he gone write the contract and don’t know except vs expect (or accept???)
Black progress is a bipartisan issue. When we created the Contract With Black America we excepted to talk to both sides of the isle. Talking truth to power is part of the process.
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The struggle: to be in solidarity AND give an honest Uber rating.
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1000 years from now they’ll talk about Republicans the way we talk about pirates or cannibals or like Pharaoh from the Bible.
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the nightmare is over 😭
back to our regularly scheduled nightmare 🙃
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Thinking about moving to a plant-based diet 🤔 anybody have experience & wisdom (or plant money?) ?
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‘We ain't dead said the children
don't believe it
We just made ourselves
invisible’ —
@fatbellybella
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The Black Art of Escape: A Soundtrack
Share BLACK MUSIC that helps you renew your mind, body, and spirit! That gives you JOY and PEACE!
We are free, already and always.
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absolutely not
Hey 30 plus, if y'all can go back to being 21, would you?
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Good Sunday Morning, my people:
I am literally FLYING over the Atlantic back home to Brooklyn, thanking GOD for every free black person (& friends!) who has read The Black Art of Escape.
Send it on to somebody, today.
Be FREE & WELL. 🖤
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“Who gives a fuck whether you’re an artist?”
I didn’t know how much I needed this conversation with
@thecreativeindp
Full interview here:
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What if we told the stories of Black artists while they were still ALIVE, in all of their complexity?
That question is at the heart of this profile of
@leonbridges
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Headed to 30 Rock for Morning Joe with that great song in my head
This joy I have
The world didn’t give it to me
...
The world didn’t give it
The world can’t take it away
#theblackartofescape
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“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
-Song of Solomon
Happy Birthday, Toni.
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I also love that Baldwin was, at once, shady af and honest af.
Here he is on Diana Ross playing Billie Holiday. From, “The Devil Finds Work”
🥶
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my 8 y/o cousin has started facetiming me multiple times a day and i think that i, a world-class avoider, am gonna have to have a difficult conversation
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If you live/vote in NY, get into this Wall Street tax! Wall Street folks are against it of course but
@beckysaletan
is pretty much always right so: "Albany lawmakers should once again call Wall Street’s bluff and put the public interest first."
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White people get to be citizens as a hobby. Black people are supposed to make citizenship our full time job, plus overtime. No, THANK YOU.
#blackartofescape
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If I were gonna, say, leave America, where should I move to?
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Wrote an appreciation of
@sarahmbroom
's The Yellow House for its arrival in the UK. It is a work that "refuses to capitulate to your impatience." I stan.
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Babyface & Teddy Riley broke Instagram, Kim Jong Un finna die, and Trump ended immigration.
Tonight is the most 2020 night of 2020.
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This is not a subtweet. It’s a plea. Get. Your. Shit. Together. 😭
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Sometimes you get scammed and can’t even be mad just gotta say Damn he got me and move on
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It’s “foreword” not “forward” babes.
Just think...”before” word...this helped me 🖤
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Welll....all I know is that it’s the birthday of a man who did some beautiful BLACKOUT shit before the world ended. Y’all remember that?? 900 of us all black and packed in together on broadway w/ our $45 tix tix ??
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
@jeremyoharris
!! 🖤
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i'm totally game to capitalize the b but i do want to say that the extra effort i have to spend to capitalize feels like the opposite of reparations
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Just watched The Great Hack, and will say....boy, white people really let each other get away with some wild shit. This woman is sitting in Cinema 1,2,3 on the UES talking about her book’s coming out next month, after she spent 3 years hijacking countries. WHEW.
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If I ever have kids I think the thing I most want to teach them is: don’t be a hater.
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y'all i grew up sleeping on people's floors you're really not gonna get me angry on the internet lol
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One of the first ideas my Palestinian friend disabused me of was the “two state solution.” It was a major eye opener to understand that “Free Palestine” did NOT mean removing Palestinians to shitty lands & refusing them citizenship.
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I keep getting messages from people I know asking when I’m running for Congress or President so let me just say I ain’t running for NOTHING.
I am FLYING. I used to wanna be PRESIDENT. Now I wanna be WELL.
I will have to re/introduce myself to my own people & that’s okay! 🖤
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can’t wait for the
@benyt
exposé on how the most powerful writers in the world got pulled into the Fyre Fest of open letters
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“There is a generation, maybe more, of traumatized high achievers, suffering in silence.”
Since this piece ran, I’ve heard from even more of my peers & current college students. This is major, y’all. Know you’re not alone. 🖤
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so when do i tell this person who keeps tell me to "stay saved" that i'm not a christian anymore ???
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As a Black American, I feel that my politics (and my spirit) must include intolerance of anti-Semitism AND intolerance of ethnic cleansing and oppression of the Palestinians AND intolerance of a US government that has fueled both, for a long long time.
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I never had or wanted a big brother, but
@AnandWrites
has come to be about as close — and as good — as it gets.
🥇 to
@Morning_Joe
for bringing us together across the 2700 miles between DC to LA 🖤
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