Abram Guerra

“One reason that the expression of the love of God is so often limited in Western society is that we do not expect it to change society and people except in a very spiritualized and narrowly defined way. We see the gospel as primarily rescuing us from hell and getting us to heaven. We have lost sight of “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.” And when we do not expect it to change lives, we will not see it change lives.”
― John M. Perkins, Beyond Charity: The Call to Christian Community Development

“When I speak of Spanglish I'make talking about a fertile terrain for negotiating a new identity. I'make feeling excited, as Gloria Anzldua did in her book Borderlands/LA Frontera,about "participating in the creation of another culture/in a state of perpetual transition/with a tolerance for ambiguity.”
― Ed Morales, Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America

“In American Negro Slavery (1918), along with eight more books and a duffel bag of articles, Phillips erased the truth of slavery as a highly lucrative enterprise dominated by planters who incessantly forced a resisting people to labor through terror, manipulation, and racist ideas. Instead he dreamed up an unprofitable commerce dominated by benevolent, paternalistic planters civilizing and caring for a “robust, amiable, obedient and content” barbaric people. Phillips’s pioneering use of plantation documents legitimated his racist dreams and made them seem like objective realities. Phillips remained the most respected scholarly voice on slavery until the mid-twentieth century.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

“Throughout the social tumult of the 1690s, Mather obsessed over maintaining the social hierarchies by convincing the lowly that God and nature had put them there, whether it applied to women, children, enslaved Africans, or poor people. In A Good Master Well Served (1696), he presumed that nature had created “a conjugal society” between husband and wife; a “Parental Society” between parent and child; and, “lowest of all,” a “herile society” between master and servant. Society, he said, became destabilized when children, women, and servants refused to accept their station. Mather compared egalitarian resisters to that old ambitious Devil, who wanted to become the all-powerful God. This line of thinking became Mather’s everlasting justification of social hierarchy: the ambitious lowly resembled Satan; his kind of elites resembled God.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America