THE PASSIVE VOICE
b"Ben reads a piece of writing titled 'The Passive Voice'.\\n\\n'The Passive Voice' was pulled together from notes made in 2020 during the George Floyd uprising, reflecting on the history of American citizenship and its relationship to slavery. The causes of racist state violence and Black American resistance to it have a material basis of course, but our understanding of them is mediated by a dense web of assumptions and ideological sleight of hand\\u2014like a police report written in the passive voice. The disconnect between the material and the ideological is the subject of these notes.\\n\\nThe piece also featured in a recent episode of Ben's radio show Red White Blues: an Anthology of America\\u2019s Music, where we hear the entirety of Charles Mingus\\u2019s 1963 masterpiece The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. We\\u2019re up to episode five now and there\\u2019s a lot more in the pipeline about jazz, oil and the making of American power. If you haven\\u2019t listened yet, you can do so at soundcloud.com/spaghettiforbrains. \\n\\nYou can also check out @__redwhiteblues on Instagram where you'll find the show notes and other fragments of research from the project."