iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Open on Bluesky →

samdi being perceived @ajangri.blacksky.app · 08/07/2025

the beginning of my first essay of the year, “broken systems: a myth of water-carrying,” coming out sometime in the next few weeks:

You can often find me yelling about language and its imprecision in communicating the many complexities of concepts and how we must try to be as precise with it as possible anyway. This comes from a belief that language, at least in part, influences how we think and how we take in information, and while I worry I'm being pedantic or overly prescriptivist, I can't really help it. I'm autistic, I deal in linguistic detail as a writer and an editor, I want to go back to school for (socio)linguistics someday-one day, I tell myself, sighing wistfully. I would look out a window wistfully too if I had any in this godforsaken apartment-and I just think language matters. This does not mean you'll ever catch me tone policing, and I will die before I become one of those niggas on Tiktok trying to correct people's pronunciation of words like
"ask" in efforts to try and drum up validation from people I know are anti-Black as shit-those are different things entirely. Rather, when I'm yelling, I'm trying to get at a problem of conceptualization and conveyance.

Anyway. I fucking hate the idea of "broken systems." At least in the political sense. In the way liberals use it. In the way it even finds itself spouted out in leftist circles. We (the collective we, not me) say the healthcare system is broken when we have to pay out of pocket for lifesaving procedures our insurance companies refuse to cover. We say the justice system is broken when (Disabled) Black kids are disproportionately targeted by their teachers and funneled into the school-to-prison pipeline. We say the education system is broken when we see illiteracy rates skyrocket among younger generations. We name these issues as systemic, and then we fall short of going into what that means. We stop at "broken systems."

But that's wrong. That's a fundamentally bad framework.