Having four months focusing on the history of the
marginalized felt pretty intense.
I don't know if spreading them out would have made
it different, because they are always kind of intense anyway. Current events,
especially of the political kind, would have still been exerting an influence.
This reading and watching occurred in conjunction with #BlackLivesMatter, and
the Malheur occupation, and a presidential race that is fascinating in many
terrible ways.
I think that I connected some things better because
other things were fresh in memory, but they might have still connected.
I guess the question exists in my mind because I
don't know that I have any grand summing up to give for how they relate to each
other. It feels like I should have something to say now, but in reality it will
be that I will have many different things to say at different times, when
different issues are raised.
Therefore, I am going to focus on two quotes from
just this last section of reading. Oddly, they are probably from the two sources
that I would recommend the least (Monday's post goes over why I might not
recommend them), but they stuck with me and I had to capture them.
The first is from The Black Jacobins by
C.L.R. James:
"Where imperialists do not find disorder they
create it deliberately... They want an excuse for going in." (p. 286)
That is true. Kill. Spread disease. Disrupt the food
source. Stir up different factions. Sometimes the disorder is already there,
and there can be people with good intentions, but as long as there is this idea
that this land or these resources or this labor that isn't ours should be, it
opens the door to all manner of evil. Dehumanization becomes necessary, and
then abuse becomes easy.
Ages ago, after first starting to read Ann Rule, I
noticed how many of these psychopaths that she wrote about were really into
acquisition. I wondered why that was, and eventually decided I had it in
reverse. Being greedy gives you lots of motivation to turn of your conscience.
Silence your conscience often enough and it loses its voice.
Maybe seeing the movie The Corporation helped
me figure that out. If you analyzed a corporation as a person, that person
would be a psychopath. The fact that the purpose of a corporation is the make
money might just guarantee that. So thank you Citizens United and Mitt Romney.
The other thing that stuck out came from But Some
of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies. Some of the best parts were essays
on educating and building activism in communities, including "Black-Eyed
Blues Connections: Teaching Black Women" by Michele Russell:
"The oldest form of building historical
consciousness in community is storytelling."
It stirred me then, and it reminds me now why so
much study got crammed together. I had things to write, and I couldn't do it
all, so I let the reading pause.
I have always been about learning stories and
telling them. Even the non-narrative things I study fill in as parts of an
overall story. That is me. My studies inform the stories that I tell, but I
also have to take time for telling. I can make peace with this.
There was one other
thing, and it wasn't so much that I wrote it down for me as that I had to share
it with a friend, but it will be something I will also ask from myself.
Still in But Some of Us Are Brave, in the
course syllabi section, for a Spring 1978 class at Hampshire College taught by
Gloria I Joseph and Carroll Oliver, in The Insurgent Sister -- The Black Woman
In U.S.A. This was listed as the first course requirement:
"Become insurgent in a politically appropriate
manner."
Okay. Maybe it is time to start writing about
politics again.
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