Connections – Week Five

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain…

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963

Bury my heart at wounded knee
I said deep in the earth
Won’t you cover me with pretty lies
Bury my heart at wounded knee

Lyrics of song by Buffy Sainte Marie, 1992

You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you. I felt like saying: “What in God’s name are you doing to yourself?”

John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me, 1961

There are too many idiots in this world.
And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952

Prospero, you are the master of illusion.
Lying is your trademark.
And you have lied so much to me
(Lied about the world, lied about me)
That you have ended by imposing on me
An image of myself.
Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
That’s the way you have forced me to see myself
I detest that image! What’s more, it’s a lie!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
And I know myself as well.

Aimé Césaire, Une Tempête, 1969

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

Mahatma Gandhi

Pharoah’s army got drownded
Oh Mary don’t you weep.

God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water, the fire next time

Spiritual, first recorded 1915