More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Nora Samaran
Read between
October 8 - October 9, 2019
“Where we are born into privilege, we are charged with dismantling any myth of supremacy. Where we were born into struggle, we are charged with claiming our dignity, joy, and liberation.”8
What does joy and liberation look like for the privileged?
where we walk in the world with unearned privileges it is our role to unlearn and “dismantle myths” of entitlement, to reconnect with empathic capacities dulled by acculturation into dominance, and to become accountable.
moments. In other words, the nonverbal cues that other people use with strangers on the subway to maintain distance are the daily communication that dismissive-avoidant attachers use with their closest family members, often without even understanding they are doing it, which may feel very confusing both to them and to those close to them.
Wherever people experience systemic oppression, the most beautiful and most powerful aspects of the self are turned around by the larger culture as weakness and as shameful.
Grief comes of recognizing that no part of oppressed people’s wholeness was ever shameful. On the contrary, these lost parts of the self are beautiful, are needed, and belong in the world. Systems of oppression repress that kind of thinking, dignity, or wholeness,
speaking and acting from their whole selves, knowing their own worth and dignity, have the power to topple those systems.
our capacity to know ourselves is powerful—and
and power in people who are situated as abject is squashed at every turn for the very reason that it has the force to overturn injustice.
On whatever axes we experience oppression, our best qualities are fed back to us as weaknesses to disguise our own tremen...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Until you have a core sense of worth and belonging, it can be very difficult to get to healthy accountability to others where, upon hearing feedback about the impact of harm, your sense of self neither collapses nor a false sense of worth needs to be defended.
As a culture, we are often so afraid to even so much as name or even think about any kind of systemic harm. When we do not name or interrupt it, out of a desire for those caught in oppressor positions to learn at a pace comfortable for them, we allow systemic oppression to continue, and we allow it to harm people for fear that even naming or recognizing the harm might in some way shame the person causing it. I have seen that dynamic play out many times, where everyone turns toward the person causing harm to comfort them, and leaves the person or people harmed to face systemic violence without
...more
Even if you face harm from one source, if you can fundamentally trust in the humans around you to recognize it and name it openly with you, so you can agree that it is happening, then the harm does not become so destructive. There is a kind of deep, visceral betrayal of human trust that can magnify harm significantly, when those around you do not even perceive it occurring. And yet that is precisely how normalized systemic violence works: it renders the harm normal, and all resistance to harm “disruptive.”
Ask Sunnie about this. How do we do this--learn to name harm openly--while still focusing on the kind of positive world we want to build and not focusing too much on the negative?
When you sit down in private with a person who has caused or perpetuated harm and work very hard to create conditions of acceptance, that is when you can see what is operating to keep that system of power in place. Depending on where they are in their own development, either the person can hear the harm, recognize it as part of a larger system not just intellectually but empathically, express their own inner need to make things right and be grateful that they can be held in that change, or they cannot handle knowing that they have hurt another person. Shame-evasion behavior can become apparent
...more
To reach a life-sustaining culture and world, we need to live it into being. It takes a deep process of unlearning and reconditioning in order to counter the internal conditioning and actively block the systems that enact violence.
If you harm someone and then make it so that they feel afraid to tell you about it, be aware that women are likely coddling you constantly day in and day out in ways that exhaust them and that you take as normal and do not even notice.
you are the kind of person who likes to know when you have caused harm, then there are some valuable questions about how to make that real: How do you invite this information? How do you welcome it? How do you thank those who help you grow this way if they have to tell you because you have not figured it out for yourself? Do you realize just how scary it can be to tell you before they know how you will react? Do you confuse their fear of you for anger? Is their fear in any way
If your focus is more on the fact that harm got named than it is on the harm itself, does this strike you as peculiar?
Coming up from underwater to speak up isn’t always pretty or easy. What if one of the effects of trauma is that after speaking calmly without being heard for so long, or after having the words get trapped in the still waters of their body, the survivor can no longer speak and can only scream?
Guilt is not empathy. Neither is shame. In fact, when people feel overwhelmed by their own inner feelings of guilt, they are more likely to attack the people around them rather than act empathetically. Feeling guilty does not make you a good person. Empathy and responsiveness make you a good person. Guilt blocks empathy.
Own. Apologize. Repair. Say, “Here is what I did. I did this thing, and that thing, and this thing. They’re fucked up because …”
Own. Completely. Do not hide what you have done. Then ask, “Have I got you? Do I understand?” and let the person clarify. Mirror until you get it. Give this the time that the person harmed feels is needed.
Say, “Wow, thank you for sharing that with me. I know how hard it can be to share something like this. I’m really grateful you took that risk, and I’m taking it to heart. Here is what I’m going to do (concrete practical things) to make sure I get better about this in the future. Does that address the need?”
Practicing accountability is a way of showing care and
If everyone who is in that circle or community or family or knit web of humans can say, “We care about you and will not discard you, and we also will not accept that you do this; it cannot go on, we will not allow it,” then you can contain the harm.
for myself, to practice decolonizing also means articulating and enacting anti-capitalist politics.
The task then, for practicing decolonization and anti-capitalism, is to relearn diverse cultural knowledges that are rooted in land relationships. It is knowledge we only receive when we don’t reify our own human form, human capacities, and our abilities to produce. In other words, when we turn away from anthropocentrism. This relearning is just not possible under capitalism—which both destroys land relations and also produces, in Armstrong’s words, “people-to-be” who have forgotten how to fully be people.
Jeannette Armstrong, “Constructing Indigeneity: Syilx Okanagan Oraliture and Tmixwcentrism,” PhD dissertation, Universität Greifswald, 2009.
continuing to be connected is the direction the river flows—it is what is considered normal and what is supported. This is a value I love very much about my family.
The idea that we have relational responsibility only to those humans we love, and no responsibility toward anyone else, is destroying the very fabric of human connection in Western societies.
Disconnection is not our physiological reality. That sense of disconnection is an illusion. To rebuild a healthy community, then, we need to understand that we have deep relational responsibilities toward even those humans whom we have not chosen and with whom we do not share deep intimacy, or even friendship.
Because when people who are uncomfortable simply turn away, that tendency can massively magnify harm to survivors.
