We know that violence always threatens to hold our creativity hostage, but it is no less incumbent, for ourselves as much as for anyone else, not to allow the “oasis,” as Du Bois called black culture, to dry up, or, worse, turn into a mirage. I am convinced the urgency of this role has become more acute, not less, as the crisis of black life in this country persists. One reason for this is that the United States has increasingly become a technocratic oligarchy, the very image of “a dusty desert of dollars and smartness” that Du Bois warned against more than a century ago. This “way of life” has produced plutocratic fortunes unimaginable even a few decades ago; services, goods, and conveniences circulate with remarkable ease and efficiency. Yet the costs are plain to see: staggering levels of social anomie, political decay, and a frightening tolerance for inequality, injustice, and spectacular cruelty. As the poet Tongo Eisen-Martin drily observes, no matter what chaos is currently gripping the land,

somewhere in america
the prison bus is running on time