Beka > Recent Status Updates

"In the book a Heart As Wide As the World, Sharon Salzberg reminds us:
'The practice of generosity frees us from the sense of isolation that arises from clinging and attachment.'"

"In patriarchal society men who want to break with domination can best begin the practice of love by being giving, by being generous. This is why feminist thinkers extolled the virtues of male parenting. Working as caregivers to young children, many men are able to experience for the first time the joy that comes from service."

"Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism. Rather than linking habits of being, usually considered innate, to learn behavior that helps maintain + support male domination, they act as though these differences are not value laden or political but are rather inherent + mystical."

Enjoying my first fiction in a while!

"Often we take friendships for granted even when they are the interactions where we experience mutual pleasure. We place them in a secondary position, especially in relation to romantic bonds. This devaluation of our friendships creates an emptiness we may not see when we are devoting all our attention to finding someone to love romantically or giving all our attention to a chosen loved one."

"Many of us learn as children that friendship should never be seen as just as important as family ties.

However, friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love + caring community. Learning to love in friendships empowers us in ways that enable us to bring this love to other interactions with family or with romantic bonds."

"The Victorian era gave rise to mass media + mass marketing -- two institutions that have since proved more effective devices for constraining women's aspirations than coercive laws + punishments. They rule with the club of conformity, not censure, + claim to speak for female public opinion, not powerful male interests."

"This map is in itself harmful to women's rights; it presents women's struggle for liberty as if it were a one-time event, a curious + even noxious by-product of a postmodern age.

It is, as poet + essayist Adrienne Rich has described it, 'the erasure of women's political + historical past which makes each new generation of feminists appear as an abnormal excrescence on the face of time.'"

"In the popular imagination, the history of women's rights is more commonly charted mostly as a flat dead line.

Ignoring the many peaks + valleys traversed in the endless march toward liberty, this mental map of American women's progress presents instead a great plain of 'traditional' womanhood, upon which women have roamed helplessly + 'naturally', eternally passive subjects until the 70s movement came along."

"What I am is the Indian who can't die. I'm the worst dream America ever had."

Just finished chapter 2. It's blowing me away that this is a 1990s book. We are so very influenced, still, by the shitty anti-women-biased reporting of the 80s. I had no clue.

"M. Scott Peck defines community as the coming together of a group of individuals 'who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to "rejoice together, mourn together" and to "delight in each other and make others conditions our own."'"

"...owning his own land was, for him, Liberation.

Labor means something different when every cent of every dollar is yours.

(Many share cropping families after slavery was outlawed worked on land that wasn't theirs, for paltry wages of 20-30 cents on the dollar. The first 70-80 cents from the crops went to the white families renting the farmland to them.)"

"Educating Black children has always been a political act.

From the moment literacy was banned for enslaved people, the work of getting Black children educated could mean danger, and even deadly force, by white supremacists who wanted a subjugated Black class."

"Some historians argue that John Brown's failed raid was the start of The Civil War."

This is a bolstering read.
Highly recommend.

"At the conclusion of the American Revolution, nothing had changed for the marginalized or those without power. For the oppressed, the Revolution was not revolutionary."

"For Black people, the state of Black health, wealth, education and housing is the end of the world in slow motion.

Revolutions are birthed from oppression.
It is a revolution that first and foremost a response that seeks change for the benefit of humanity.

Revolutions are not needed to improve a system, they are needed to create a new world."

"The historian Stephanie Camp argued, 'Women's history does not merely ADD to what we know; it changes WHAT we know and how we know it.'

We cannot know the history of white supremacy in this country, and the violent efforts to demolish it, without Black women; their contributions to revolution, protection, force, flight, and joy change what we know about this country, and how we know it."

"A revolution is the end to the hoarding of resources and wealth, and the exploitation of human beings.
The violence of revolution is radical or forceful only in its undoing of whiteness, but ultimately a revolution is not bloodshed: It is forfeiture and equitable redistribution."

"At the core of revolution is structural change, not violence. A revolution can be as ceremonial as a democratic transfer of power. A revolution is clean water, access to quality Healthcare, sufficient shelter, equitable schools, safety, an end to mass incarceration, restorative justice and the like. A revolution looks like everyday life for many white Americans."

"The opposite of poverty is not wealth, but justice."