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i write to understand culture

I Write To Understand Culture

December 31, 20252 min read

I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid. You’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of CHANGE.

  • Neo (The Matrix 1999)

I didn’t plan to write this down.

It started as a note to myself—something I kept circling back to because it refused to stay settled.

I’d notice it while watching how quickly ideas moved now, how easily they were named, packaged, and forgotten.

Nothing lingered long enough to be understood.

There was a moment—not dramatic, just clarifying—when I realized how much of culture passes without being examined.

Work is released before it’s contextualized.

Movements are declared before they’re traced.

Artifacts appear without lineage and disappear without record.

That’s when it became clear why I write at all.

Writing, for me, isn’t expression.

It’s interruption.

It’s how I slow things down long enough to see their shape.

Essays let me stay with a question past the moment where most people move on.

They let patterns surface that only reveal themselves over time.

I learned this before I had language for it.

Hip hop made the lesson unavoidable.

Hip hop doesn’t wait for permission to be archived.

It documents lived experience as it happens—through sound, movement, language.

It remembers itself because it has to.

The same is true of creative work more broadly.

Meaning doesn’t survive because it’s loud or efficient.

It survives because someone cared enough to place it in context, to connect it to what came before, to leave a record that could be returned to.

Over time, some lines of thought stop changing.

They ask to be preserved.

That’s when writing becomes something else: a book, a film, an archive, a body of work.

Not as escalation—but as residue.

What remains after the thinking has done its work.

This site exists to hold that process in one place.

The essays are where the thinking happens.

The books are what remains once the thinking settles.

I write to understand culture—not to explain it away, but to leave behind something that still makes sense when the moment has passed.

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Miquiel Banks

Award-Winning Technical Writer, Newspaper Editor, Hip Hop Videographer, and Graffiti Artist.

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