Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay reflects on how the pandemic has intensified long-standing discussions regarding race, Blackness, white privilege and supremacy, settler colonialism, social justice, and more. I draw from forty years of ethnographic fieldwork or being part of the departmental leadership of Latin American and Latino Studies at my university. This essay uses propositional logic to establish a poetics of radical compassion as prior to radical politics, followed by the “scenic” as evidence to “prove” that paradox is our living condition. In contrast, today’s totalization and capitalization of fear and the hypostatization of truth claims—insofar as they obscure the emptiness of truth—are the methods of war.