Brianna > Recent Status Updates

"[I]f you give young people the tools to make sense of their history, you are giving them the tools to make sense of themselves"

"Had I known when I was younger what some of these students were sharing, I felt as if I would have been liberated from a social & emotional paralysis that for so long I could not name - a paralysis that had arisen from never knowing enough of my own history to effectively identify the lies I was being told by others"

"For many of the people I met [..] the story of the Confederacy is the story of their home, of their family - and the story of their family is the story of them. So when they are asked to reckon with the fact that their ancestors fought a war to keep my ancestors enslaved, there is resistance to facts [..]They are forced to confront the lies they have upheld. They are forced to confront the flaws of their ancestors."

"White supremacy enacts violence against Black people, but also numbs a whole country - Black and white - to what would in any other context provoke our moral indignation."

"Oppression is never about humanity or lack thereof. It is, and always has been, about power."

I am attached to this landscape, I owe it something, and am grateful...I have seen it at all times of day and all seasons of the year...But my freest and most familiar intercourse with it is in the milder months, when no extra clothing is required, to dash out quickly, between two showers, for a quarter of an hour; to bend aside in passing a bough of black alder and get a glimpse of the river as it flows.

"The cash rewards for turning in fugitives as well as the expectation that white people would offer the authorities information on runaways is a reminder that the minority of slave-holding colonists depended on the vigilance of the majority who did not own slaves to police the system."

"As a student of African heritage growing up in Santa Cruz...the role my ancestors played in the development of the country was never revealed. Slavery was always downplayed in favor of glorifying Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. How was I to regard my heritage with confidence while the environment I was raised in depicted Africans as nothing but slaves saved by a white man?"

"As helpful as social media can be when it comes to experimentation and self-discovery, we also need time to understand ourselves outside of our public performance of who we are - not so much a break from our digital lives as much as a break for the kind of living we can only do when we're not on display."

So be realistic. Be courageous. Be true to your nature and offer your trust. Do good in broad daylight, and don't be ashamed of your generosity.

Sometimes our sociable instinct gets in the way of truth and of equity ... History teaches that progress often begins with people whom others feel to be preachy or even unfriendly. People with the nerve to get on their soapbox at social occasions. Who raise unpleasant subjects that make you uneasy.

Cherish those people, because they're the key to progress.

Among the most notable findings to come out of contact science is that prejudices can be eliminated only if we retain our own identity. We need to realize it's okay that we're all different -- there's nothing wrong with that.

Looking back on the most hopeful shifts in recent decades, we see that trust and contact were instrumental every time ... But merely living in a mixed neighborhood isn't enough. If you seldom talk to your neighbors, diversity can actually heighten prejudice ... Contact researchers consequently stress that people need time to get used to one another

The Pygmalion and Golem Effects are woven into the fabric of our world. Every day, we make each other smarter or stupider, stronger or weaker, faster or slower. We can't help leaking expectations through our gazes, our body language and our voices. My expectations about you define my attitude towards you, and the way I behave towards you in turn influences your expectations and therefore your behaviour towards me.

Power appears to work like an anesthetic that makes you insensate to other people. In a 2014 study, three American neurologists [tested] the cognitive functioning of powerful and less powerful people. They discovered that a sense of power disrupts what is known as mirroring, a mental process which plays a key role in empathy ... it is almost as if they no longer feel connected to their fellow human beings.

[A] better world doesn't start with more empathy. If anything, empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with victims, the more we generalize about our enemies. The bright spotlight we shine on our chosen few makes us blind to the perspective of our adversaries, because everybody else falls outside our view.

In practical terms ... empathy is a hopelessly limited skill. Its something we feel for people who are close to us; for people we can smell, see, hear and touch. For family and friends, for fans of our favourite band, and maybe for the homeless guy on our own street corner. For cute puppies we can cuddle and pet, even as we eat animals mistreated on factory farms out of sight.

Do strong ties to our own group predispose us to feel animosity towards others?

[On the Danish resistance] "Even injustice needs a semblance of law ... That is hard to find when the entire society denies the right of the stronger."

The good news is: these are trainable skills. Resistance just takes practice. "What distinguishes Milgram's heroes ... is largely a teachable competency at resisting questionable authority."

If you push people hard enough, if you poke and prod, bait and manipulate, many of us are indeed capable of doing evil. The road to hell is paved with good inte. But evil doesn't live just beneath the surfce; it takes immense effort to draw it out. And most importantly, evil has to be disguised as doing good.

friendly foxes [were] not only remarkably astute, but also much smarter than their aggressive counterparts...the assumption had always been that domestication diminishes brainpower, literally reducing grey matter & in the process sacrificing skills needed to survive in the wild. But Brian came to a completely different conclusion. "If you want a clever fox you don't select for cleverness. You select for friendliness"

People who follow the news are more likely to agree with statements such as 'Most people only care about themselves.' They more often believe that we as individuals are helpless to better the world. They are more likely to be stressed and depressed.

(George Gerbner's research)

If we believe most people can't be trusted, that's how we'll treat each other, to everyone's detriment. Few ideas have as much power to shape the world as our view of other people.

Dictators and despots, governors and generals -- they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self-interest, just like them.

He remarked himself yesterday that we are all made up of so many inconsistent selves that anything like an exact representation of them by a novelist would entirely bewilder the reader.

I feel that these talks with Max permanently enrich my mind, and no doubt much of it will recur spontaneously in future memories; he is like traveling abroad - one feels the benefit afterwards.

"Sometimes the two lines of my life would move at a constant pace. Other times career would accelerate, and marriage/family would stall. Then career would stall, and marriage/family would flourish. No time was ever easy; I was always punishing myself for one parallel line of my life or the other, even experiencing anxiety attacks and serious health issues."

Finding it really hard to take seriously a novel whose first narrator is Marie Antoinette's spirit. The reader reviews are so good that I may try to give it a chance, though.