I’ve been having trouble writing here lately. The last time I posted,  I was writing about the Orlando massacre. Since I posted that, there have been three more national tragedies, and still more international ones.  Adam Gopnik, in his most recent essay about gun violence for The New Yorker,  writes “The one thing we can be sure of, after we have mourned the last massacre, is that there will be another. You wake up at three in the morning, check the news, and there it is.” I don’t have words, but I wanted to leave here a collection of things that I’ve seen or read over the last few days, things that have helped me make some kind of sense of my world, or things that have at least spoken directly to my bafflement.

The police are the armed wing of American consciousness.

— Ijeoma Oluo (@IjeomaOluo) July 7, 2016

Roxane Gay, in an essay for Marie Claire,  asks us to examine our understanding of the word “ally”.

I am reminded of a conversation I had with Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2015, upon the release of his book Between the World and Me. When I asked him about allies, he said, “I think one has to even abandon the phrase ‘ally’ and understand that you are not helping someone in a particular struggle; the fight is yours.” I mulled his words over for weeks because they were so pointed and powerful. Those words began to inform the ways in which I try to support other marginalized people—making their fights my own because that’s the only way forward.

Black people do not need allies. We need people to stand up and take on the problems borne of oppression as their own, without remove or distance. We need people to do this even if they cannot fully understand what it’s like to be oppressed for their race or ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, class, religion, or other marker of identity. We need people to use common sense to figure out how to participate in social justice.

Vox ran this first-person essay by former officer Reddit Hudson that offers a compelling explanation of some of the dynamics at play in any given police force.

On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.

That’s a theory from my friend K.L. Williams, who has trained thousands of officers around the country in use of force.

Finally, in one of the most beautifully written essays I’ve read, Garnette Cadogan writes about “Walking While Black.” Cadogan writes about walking the streets in Kingston Jamaica, and transferring to a new world when he began attending college in New Orleans:

On my first day in the city, I went walking for a few hours to get a feel for the place and to buy supplies to transform my dormitory room from a prison bunker into a welcoming space. When some university staff members found out what I’d been up to, they warned me to restrict my walking to the places recommended as safe to tourists and the parents of freshmen. They trotted out statistics about New Orleans’s crime rate. But Kingston’s crime rate dwarfed those numbers, and I decided to ignore these well-meant cautions. A city was waiting to be discovered, and I wouldn’t let inconvenient facts get in the way. These American criminals are nothing on Kingston’s, I thought. They’re no real threat to me.

What no one had told me was that I was the one who would be considered a threat.

I’d love to hear about anything you’re reading that has shed some light on the darkness. Please leave me a link in the comments.