In Birk’s version, each chapter of the Quran has been carefully copied in English in a calligraphy modeled on the urban graffiti of America’s inner cities. The stark black text is bordered by scenes from American life both mundane and extraordinary: gangsters flashing signs, Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, migrants working the fields, a crowded airport lounge and a raging California wildfire among them.

Each painting relates to the sura, or chapter, it illustrates, either literally or metaphorically, Birk said.

My ongoing call, however, is for non-white people to develop an understanding of race that is meticulous, logical, and systematic. Racism has a sole, functional expression: White supremacy. Racism is not historical. It’s futuristic. It is not going away. It is being refined. It is weaponized through deceit, secrecy, and violence, in that order. It’s chief tools are not clubs, bullets, or nooses, but words.

Most of all, however, those white people who say they are not racists, or that they are against racism, should be clearing race from the paths of Black people, like snowplows going through highway drifts. By doing nothing, or doing nothing effective, they cast racist suspicion on themselves through their inertness. The practice of white supremacy is a system, and it involves people giving all kinds safe harbor to racists—physical, social, financial, emotional, relational, hierarchical, psychological, etc.

and as far as i could tell, they didn’t hate us for our playacting. they didn’t despise us or judge us or even seem to think much less of us for it. this, above all other things, was what underscored their naivety: to them, we were still their elders. perhaps we didn’t know as much as they did, but simply by virtue of our being their parents and teachers, shuyukh and family, we were accorded a basic level of respect. the children thought that this was how relations between children and adults necessarily functioned: a mutual deception, where one side grossly overestimated its own awareness. we taught them well, didn’t we. so well that even we’d forgotten how little we knew, how flimsy was the foundation upon which we’d built our silences.

that’s the funny part, the funny part that can drive a person to tears. who was being protected from whom, if these kids where hiding their hurts because this was the system we said we’d set up for their benefit?