Beka > Recent Status Updates

"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."

"Our culture's fixation on nonviolence has caused us to miss entire histories of Black responses to white supremacy. In fact, many of the forms of resistance we see today are built on more radical strategies than those in power wish us to know.

Not every solution to racism calls for a march, a hashtag, a speech."

"...Even a child understood the efficacy of force and the limitations of nonviolence.

These are the kinds of hard conversations We Refuse seeks to foster: we must be honest about what actions produce structural results, and what actions produce symbolic results."

"Dear listener,
In the spirit of W.E.B. Du Bois, I am writing to you not only with the belief in Black humanity, but also with the belief that in the pursuit of freedom, courtesy is not a virtue."

"Living simply makes loving simple.
The choice to live simply necessarily enhances our capacity to love.
It is the way we learn to practice compassion, daily affirming our connection to a world community."

"To maintain and satisfy greed, one must support domination. And the world of domination is always a world without love."

"Greed is rightly considered a "deadly sin" because it erodes the moral values that encourage us to care for the common good.

Greed violates the spirit of connectedness + community that is natural to human survival. It wipes out individual recognition of the needs + concerns of everyone, replacing this awareness with harmful self-centeredness."

"When greedy consumption is the order of the day, dehumanization becomes acceptable. Then, treating people like objects is not only acceptable but is required behavior.

It's the culture of exchange, the tyranny of marketplace values."

"Mosses have a covenant with change.

They shrink and shrivel while carefully laying the groundwork for their own renewal."