angel asunder

“Seeing a person or piece of creation trampled should always disrupt something in us. It should always do something to the soul. And when you trace that trampling back across generations and systems and powers, a quiet sorrow is born in you.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“I don't want to make it to the promised land if it means I forget the wilderness.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“It takes time to undo the whiteness of God. When I speak of whiteness, I am referring not to the mere existence of a person in a particular body; I am referring to the historic, systemic, and sociological patterns that have oppressed, killed, abducted, abused, and discredited those who do not exist in a particular body. Whiteness is a force.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“These are spiritual afflictions in and of themselves, but in religious communities, when whiteness becomes inseparable from the character of God, you’ll find customs such as evangelism equated with conquering, but admissible under the guise of “love.” You’ll find guilt-driven spirituality, which is obsessed with alleviating guilt and becoming “clean”—for whiteness always carries the memory of what it has done to those in bodies of color, and guilt is its primary tormentor. The irony, of course, is that this guilt cannot be relieved save by a rending of whiteness from the image of God (which the force of whiteness will never do). In order to rend whiteness from the face of God, we must do more than make new images.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us