Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“And that is because they do not study the language to speak it. Instead, they study the portion of the language that is most amenable to flash- cards and pop quizzes: conjugations, vocabulary, declensions. This amenable portion of knowledge has great value, but removed from everyday life, it's just theory. Imagine learning to swim by reading and memorizing the steps of a front crawl but never jumping into a pool.”

“There should never be pressure on the victim to forgive. Ever.”

“As DeVega put it, "Forgiveness for racist violence is a given, an unearned expectation of White America." Our white supremacist society has conditioned itself to demand this forgiveness because it depends on it in order to proceed as it always has. … the families of those killed by police are "asked to grant forgiveness to someone who has not asked for it but [are] really being asked to absolve the system…"”

“This is where we often see forgiveness weaponized. In the wider secular culture, in Christian culture, and yes, even in Jewish culture where we use Maimonides and really should know better, there is often pressure on victims to forgive even when the perpetrator hasn't done all of the work, or even any work at all.”

“Much harm is caused when we regard others as objects, or in transactional ways, and forget to behold their full humanity—to see them as complete human beings whose concerns and feelings matter as much as our own. I believe that a true apology must be an interaction that honors the full humanity of the other; it is not transactional.”

“In the international human-rights context, it is the adults who recruit the young people into armed conflict who are to blame. It's not the young people themselves. And in international criminal law there's mostly a decision to not punish young people, even if they did really horrible things, and that's a very striking contrast to how the United States treats juvenile offenders.” (Martha Minow)

“The size at which our (local, national, and global] community has grown-it's grown past our ability to feel deeply connected, and that's when we lose accountability-our sense of belonging to each other. You simply can't know that many people-there's an empathy exhaustion that happens. The answer to the question "To whom am I responsible?" would have been so different 200 or 400 years ago.” (Sarah-Bess Dworin)

“"He acts like he has no relatives"… evokes that sense of not being accountable to others… To being given a harsher punishment because the person making that determination regards you as unlike them. These are… drivers of harm. And their opposite—embeddedness in community—shows the path back to empathy, to concern, to remorse, repentance, and repair.”

“Exclusivity, however, is still an attractive, even compelling feature of paradise because some, the unworthy, are not there. Boundaries are secure; watchdogs, gates, keepers are there to verify the legitimacy of the inhabitants. Such enclaves are cropping up again, like medieval fortresses and moats, and it does not seem possible or desirable for a city to be envisioned in which poor people can be accommodated.”

“Plenty should not be regulated to a paradisiacal state, but to normal, everyday, humane life.”

“Judge Joseph Flies-Away…says that in his community, when a person commits a criminal act, "People say, 'He acts like he has no relatives." Flies-Away regards the law as a tool not to punish, but rather to bring people back into their communal context and to help them heal. He notes, "People do the worst things when they have no ties to people. Tribal court systems are a tool to make people connected again." ”

“[prison] abolition challenges us to ask, "Why do we have no other well-resourced options?" and pushes us to creatively consider how we can grow, build, and try other avenues to reduce harm. Repeated attempts to improve the sole option offered by the state, despite how consistently corrupt and injurious it has proven itself, will neither reduce nor address the harm that actually required the call.” (Mariame Kaba)

“At the same time, it [the carceral system] allows us to avoid our own responsibilities to hold each other accountable, instead delegating it to a third party-one that has been built to hide away social and political failures.” (Mariame Kaba)

“Disposing of people by locking them away in jails and prisons does nothing significant to prevent, reduce, or transform harm in the aggregate. It rarely, if ever, encourages people to take accountability for their actions. Instead, our adversarial court system discourages people from ever acknowledging, let alone taking responsibility for, the harm they have caused.” (Mariame Kaba)

Early in this book Coates said, “It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt—to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning.” I am indeed haunted by his chapter titled, “Bearing the Flaming Cross.”

“All classes of a people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be.”

“Black people, here and there, victims of the West—a people held just outside its liberal declarations, but kept close enough to be enchanted with its promises. We know the beauty of this house—its limestone steps, its wainscoting, its marble baths. But more, we know that the house is haunted, that there is blood in the bricks and ghosts in the attic. We know that there is both tragedy and comedy in this condition.”

“We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined.”

“It was not just the conscience of the enslaver that had to be soothed but multiple consciences beyond his: the slave drivers and slave breakers, slave hunters and slave ship captains, lords and congressmen, kings and queens, priests, presidents, and everyday people with no real love for the slave but with human eyes and human ears nonetheless.”

“It may seem strange that people who have already attained a position of power through violence invest so much time in justifying their plunder with words. But even plunderers are human beings whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them when they meet the eyes of their victims. And so a story must be told, one that raises a wall between themselves and those they seek to throttle and rob.”

“if he tried to describe the forces shaping his life, my father would see his own actions first: his credits, his mistakes. But if he widened the aperture to the world around him, he would see that some people's credits earned them more and their mistakes cost them less. And those people who took more and paid less lived in a world of iniquitous wealth, while his own people lived in a world of terrifying want"

“The Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie, who had a strong influence on the development of this system, concluded in the early 1990s that the more a person meting out consequences sees themselves as unlike a perpetrator of crime, the harsher the punishment that person is likely to suggest. This observation reveals a lot about how racism and other forms of bias can riddle criminal justice systems...”

“I am thinking of young writers everywhere whose task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.”

“The systems we oppose are systems of oppression, and thus inherently systems of cowardice.”

“You cannot act upon what you cannot see. And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world. And it is not enough to stand against these dissemblers. There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity.”

“You have to walk the land. You have to see the elevation for yourself, the color of the soil. You have to discover that the ravine is really a valley and that the stream is in fact a river winding south from a glacier in the mountains. You can't know any of this beforehand. You can't "logic" your way through it or retreat to your innate genius.”

“I think this tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future, if only because what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen.”

“...Douglass is thus not a stock character called "slave," but a human like us. To write like this, to imagine the enslaved, the colonized, the conquered as human beings has always been a political act.”

“Haunt. You've heard me say this word a lot. It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt—to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, "Have you read this yet?" ”

“Of the several realms of difference, the most stubborn to imagine convincingly is the racial difference. It is a stubbornness born of ages of political insistence and social apparatus. And while it has an almost unmitigated force in political and domestic life, the realm of racial difference has been allowed an intellectual weight to which it has no claim.”