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Every night Thou freest our spirits from the body

And its snare, making them pure as rased tablets.

Every night spirits are released from this cage,

And set free, neither lording it nor lorded over.

At night prisoners are unaware of their prison,

At night kings are unaware of their majesty.

Then there is no thought or care for loss or gain,

No regard to such an one or such an one.


Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Quite a bit of sanctimony so far...put it down after a couple chapters.

'I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part, the two worlds would eventually cohere."

Quotes such as this have me clearing my calendar next year to read Baldwin:

https://twitter.com/blkhiststudies/st...

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

This was not an aberration...The people who planted the bomb in the girls' restroom in the basement of 16th Street Baptist Church were not pathological, but rather the normal products of their surroundings. And it was this spectacular, violent event, the savage dismembering of four little girls, which had burst out of the daily, sometimes even dull, routine of racist oppression.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo-obedient to our keepers but dangerous to each other.

True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.

Believe not because some old manuscripts are produced, believe not because it is your national belief, believe not because you have been made to believe from your childhood, but reason truth out, and after you have analyzed it, then if you find it will do good to one and all, believe it, live up to it and help others live up to it. - Buddha

"My Father's Country is the Poor," an essay relating Walker's 1977 trip to Cuba, is the most emotionally and intellectually nourishing essay I've read in some time. Despite debilitating treatment of gays, Walker's depiction of Cuba eviscerates captalist (American) coloring of la revolución.

The most important question in the world is, “Why is the child crying?”- Alice Walker

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it… No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. —Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” World Tom

Wow...just, wow.

It is a credit to a writer like Ernest J. Gaines, a black writer who writes mainly about the people he grew up with in rural Louisiana, that he can write about whites and blacks exactly as he sees them and knows them, instead of writing of one group as a vast malignant lump and of the other as a conglomerate of perfect virtues.

Google has already driven its fleet of autonomous cars more than 500,000 miles on real roads throughout the United States without causing an accident.

If your three-year-old child is wailing and your five-year-old is standing nearby with a devilish grin and a plastic hammer, it’s a good bet the hammer had something to do with the wailing. But the big problems that society cares about—crime and disease and political dysfunction, for instance—are more complicated than that. Their root causes are often not so nearby, or obvious, or palatable.

"When Americans die in mining accidents, we work to fix the issues that caused those deaths. When airplanes crash, we work to make them safer. We responded to automobile deaths with seat belts...yet there are those who believe gun legislation should be off limits." - Barack Obama

The world had to upend itself before shades of possibility between decorum and disgrace could emerge. Suddenly people like us were denouncing war and imperialism, discarding the strategic protocol of civil rights for the combat aggression of Black Power. We unmade out straightened hair, remade our pristine diction, renounced our social niceties and snobberies...The entitlements of Negroland were no longer relevant.

I don't remember ever saying "Negro" or "White"; I remember carefully saying "my out-of-school friends" and "my school friends" - but since some of my out-of-school friends were in school with me, this nomenclature did not serve my strategic evasions.

I was clearly maneuvering to control my racial airspace.

White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed just as often. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.

And have bought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. - James Baldwin

I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago-the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth-loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts.

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear.

Además, como señala Krueger, el delito tiene como principal impulso la ganancia personal, mientras que el terrorismo es fundamentalmente un acto político. En su análisis, el tipo de persona con más probabilidades de convertirse en terrorista es similar al tipo de persona con más probabilidades de… votar. Hay que ver el terrorismo como una pasión cívica con esteroides.

I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading.—Toni Morrison