There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“To talk about our enemies is also to talk about our beloveds. To take a windowless room and paint a single window, through which the width and breadth of affection can be observed. To walk to that window, together, if you will allow it, and say to each other How could anyone cast any ill on this. And we will know then, collectively, that anyone who does this is one of our enemies.”

This quote, from the very first page of the narrative, sets the tone of the book as a non-traditional reflection on a community, a sport, and a life. In this passage, Abdurraqib constructs an imagined space in which he and the reader might look at and agree upon what they love—a point of connection from which they can begin to define the world. This idea frames the entire book in the rhetoric of philosophy, so that every memory, description, poem, or argument, no matter how it is framed, feels like a mutual exploration of meaning instead of a settled lesson or a singularly understood memory.

“So much of the machinery of race- and/or culture-driven fear relies on who is willing to be convinced of what. How easy it is to manufacture weaponry out of someone else’s living if the emphasis is placed on the wrong word, or if that word is repeated enough, perhaps in a hushed tone.”

This passage emphasizes how rhetoric—language utilized to persuade—influences culture. Abdurraqib states, however, that prejudice requires a willingness to be convinced of a particular idea. So much of prejudicial language also relies on the unspoken, the implication. By stating these things clearly and in precise language, Abdurraqib lays bare the violence that underpins much of the racist rhetoric that surrounds his community, even though the rhetoric is often couched in concern or faux empathy.