Today I want to share a poem by Professor Claudia Rankine, who is currently with the New York University Creating Writing Program. This poem shines a light on systemic racism and social injustice. It was written during the pandemic, after the murder of George Floyd. Among other elegant elements, it has a delicate reference to Rousseau’s The Social Contract. I started to read The Social Contract myself during this period of time, because I was hoping to find something I could apply to the current social environment. I found more questions than answers, which I suppose is somewhat typical of philosophy.
Tomorrow I’ll discuss Rollo Dilworth’s setting of this poem to music. Here is Professor Rankine’s Weather.
Weather
On a scrap of paper in the archive is written
I have forgotten my umbrella. Turns out
in a pandemic everyone, not just the philosopher,
is without. We scramble in the drought of information
held back by inside traders. Drop by drop. Face
covering? No, yes. Social distancing? Six feet
under for underlying conditions. Black.
Just us and the blues kneeling on a neck
with the full weight of a man in blue.
Eight minutes and forty-six seconds.
In extremis. I can’t breathe gives way
to asphyxiation, to giving up this world,
and then mama, called to, a call
to protest, fire, glass, say their names, say
their names, white silence equals violence,
the violence of again, a militarized police
force teargassing, bullets ricochet, and civil
unrest taking it, burning it down. Whatever
contracts keep us social compel us now
to disorder the disorder. Peace. We’re out
to repair the future. There’s an umbrella
by the door, not for yesterday but for the weather
that’s here. I say weather but I mean
a form of governing that deals out death
and names it living. I say weather but I mean
a November that won’t be held off. This time
nothing, no one forgotten. We are here for the storm
that’s storming because what’s taken matters.
We must be soldiers for Art! 
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