Racism
Ongoing discussion…
Racism
We have been an essentially colonial civilization since the first enclosed farm, since agriculture, really, but definitely since territorial wars, slavery, and resource extraction. It’s what we do - not just with imperial armies, but with basic capitalism. This is our average. Our normal. A digital media environment with algorithms and AIs... See more
Douglas Rushkoff • Pockets of Weird: The Fight Over Reality
The rest of my teachers maybe did the best they could, but they just needed a lot of help making their best better. There were so many things we needed in those classrooms, in our city, in our state, in our country that our teachers could have provided if they would have gone home and really done their homework. They never once said the words:
... See moreKiese Laymon • Heavy: An American Memoir
Decolonizing reality consists of unlearning consensual “reality,” of seeing through reality’s roles and descriptions by what Don Juan calls acts of not-doing.
Gloria Anzaldua • Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Latin America Otherwise)
At the same time, imagination must be decolonized. The dominant modes of imagining the future—technocratic, extractivist, growth-driven—are not universal. They are specific to white, masculine, WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) subjectivities trained to equate imagination not only with control, scale and optimization, but... See more
Practical imagination
There are very strong words of Martin Luther King. His question was always, how is it that one group—the white group—can despise another group, which is the black group. And will it always be like this? Will we always be having an elite condemning or pushing down others that they consider not worthy? And he says something I find extremely beautiful
... See moreKrista Tippett • Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and the Art of Living
spoke not of changing the world, but of listening to one’s inner life.
Cole Arthur Riley • This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
be true, because there is only one God. God cannot possibly be divided in this way. I have it! I am having my hell now. When I die, I shall have my heaven. The master’s having his heaven now. When he dies, he will have his hell.” The next day, chopping cotton beneath the torrid skies, the slave said to his mate: I got shoes, You got shoes, All
... See moreHoward Thurman • Jesus and the Disinherited
Writer James Baldwin on hate as a defense mechanism:
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
James Clear • 3-2-1: On Hate as a Defense Mechanism, Reciprocity, and Consistency | James Clear
And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do.