Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“There may indeed come a time when universities may have to fight for the privilege of intellectual freedom.”

“There may come a time when we—students, faculty, administrators, artists, and parents—will have to fight hard for education, fight hard for uncorrupted science (not the ideological or racist science); for sound social history, apolitical anthropology (not strategies of control); for the integrity of art (not its celebrity).”

“I was convinced there was no race card—there was simply a deck, each one operating on a terrain much wider than previously thought, echoing its influence in the national culture.”

“From the Constitution, to the Electoral College, the battle over enfranchising unpropertied citizens, women, the illiterate… [race] is there in the construction of a…public school system;…representation in legislative bodies; jurisprudence and legal definitions of justice; [race] is there in…banking houses; …manifest destiny and the driving narrative of the Americanization of every immigrant who came ashore”

“I chose to write as though there was nothing to prove or disprove, as though an unraced world already existed. Not to transcend race, or to aspire to some fraudulent "universalism" — a code word that had come to mean "nonblack" — but to claim the liberty of my own imagination. For I have never lived, nor has anyone, in a world in which race did not matter.”

“Jamelle Bouie makes an important point: "There have always been these negotiations in the public sphere about what people can say, and those have always been mediated by who has power and who doesn't... What I think is novel about the present is that it's people who, under ordinary circumstances, may not necessarily have power...all of a sudden have a forum for voicing displeasure...has weight on the institution." ”

“Melville’s truth was his recognition of the moment in America when whiteness became ideology. And if the white whale is the ideology of race, what Ahab has lost to it is personal dismemberment and family and society and his own place as a human in the world. The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self, and has always seemed to me a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis.”

“For early American writers, how could there be competition with nations or peoples who were presumed unable to handle or uninterested in handling the written word? One could write about them, but there was never the danger of their "writing back." Just as one could speak to them without fear of their "talking back." ”

“Cultures, whether silenced or monologistic, whether repressed or repressing, seek meaning in the language and images available to them.”

“"one who commits slander never gains forgiveness." This position is codified in later Jewish law to mean that the injured party is not ever required to forgive. Why slander, of all things? The standard explanation for this is that the damage is irrevocable—there's no way for a penitent to correct their lie to all of the people who have heard it.”

“It always seemed to me that the people who invented the hierarchy of "race" when it was convenient for them ought not to be the ones to explain it away, now that it does not suit their purposes for it to exist. ”

“Saul Friedlander suggested that ‘the undercurrent of sympathy for the persecuted Jews must have been significant enough’ because in June 1935 Goebbels attacked those Germans who ‘shamelessly’ argued that Jews were human beings too. ”

“Bauer believed that it was ‘the moderate anti-Semitism of the bulk of the German population (that) was absolutely crucial... Mass murder of a designated minority can be achieved without the deep-seated hatred of the perpetrating majority. The Germans did not have to hate the Jews in order to kill them.’ ”

“By November 1932 the Nazis had passed the peak of their popular support. It was this that led to pressure on Hindenburg to offer the Presidency to Hitler. The goal of physically destroying the organisations and parties of the German working class appeared to be slipping away.”

“Auschwitz was first designated as a suitable site for Russian prisoners-of-war at the beginning of 1940. Within a few months the SS moved in. The first gas chamber was tested on Russian prisoners in the fall of 1941. Auschwitz’s first inmates were Poles and its main purpose was the exploitation of their labour. ... It is estimated that 120,000 non-Jews died in Auschwitz, of whom 60% were Poles.”

“Meditation and therapy and rehab and reading all the books in the world won't change us if we aren't willing to make serious changes in our environment, our habits, and our ways of being. Literally or metaphorically, we need to be willing to exile ourselves from who and how we have been. And it doesn't happen overnight.”

“One all-too-common pitfall along the path of repentance involves trying to do this work while still holding on to power and control in a situation. You can understand the temptation—it's a lot less emotionally risky...”

“Because repentance is, I believe, in part, a kind of self-care. When we do the work, we give attention to our own broken places, our own reactionary impulses, our own careless ignorance. And it's a way of saying, "Hey, self, you need some attention. Let's give you some help becoming the kind of person you want to be." ”

“The work of repentance is... the work of looking outside ourselves, looking with an empathetic eye at what we have done, letting it matter to us, and trying earnestly to figure out how we can both meaningfully address it and ensure that it never happens again. This is, in some ways, an act of tenderness, of extending ourselves to care for others...”

“we can think of punishment as coming only from the outside, and accountability as inviting or pushing people to do the work from within”

“To look at another person-or a community, or a team of people and say: Where are you? What are you feeling and experiencing now, and how might I have brought you pain or difficulty? And to care about making that as right as I can. It's an act of concern. And facing the harm that I caused is an act of profound optimism. It is a choice to grow, to learn, to become someone who is more open and empathetic.”

“And, as the Black writer Brooke Obie puts it, within oppressive systems, single acts of oppression have "the power to not only destroy an individual, but put an entire group of people on notice about what harm awaits them and [to witness] the lack of accountability for their perpetrators. Harm-doers have to understand the full extent of the harm they're causing in order to get to repentance, reparation..." ”

“it's impossible to regard these as individual behaviors that do not function inside an oppressive, interlocking set of systems. It is the presence of power that transforms prejudice into racism, that transforms bias into misogyny, and so forth.”

“Of the 5.7 million Russian soldiers who were captured, 3.3 million were murdered, often in the death camps. Total Soviet losses are estimated at over 20 million. This too was part of the Holocaust. The Nazis looked upon Russians as livestock. Millions would have to starve if the German Army, the Wehrmacht, was going to be fed during the invasion of Russia.”

“It was Bolshevism that was Hitler’s main enemy... ‘Knowledge of the Jews is the only key whereby one may understand the inner nature and therefore the real aims of Social Democracy… and then out of the murk and fog of social phrases rises the grimacing figure of Marxism’ ...But in arguing that anti-Semitism was subordinate to anti-Bolshevism, Bauer unwittingly conceded that the Jews were not the Nazis’ main target.”

“The first victims of the Nazi regime were the organisations of the German left and the working class, not the Jews. The trade unions were banned on 2 May 1933 .... the first concentration camp, Dachau, which was set up shortly after the federal elections of March 5. The persecution of the Jews only began in earnest after the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The repression of the German working class began immediately.”

“It was an elite in the Nazi Party, some 200 men, who Christopher Browning called the ‘true believers’, who bore primary responsibility for the Holocaust. The real success of Nazi propaganda lay in the ‘depersonalization’ of the Jews.”

“Defensiveness, however, shuts out the possibility of attending to the pain we have caused. ”

“if we believe that doing a harmful thing is the same thing as being a bad person. If someone interprets the statement "You said something racist" to mean "You are an irredeemably racist person," they might well resist the critique, seeing it as a condemnation of their whole self. But walking the path of antiracism is riddled with mistakes and new learning...”

“And once he has moved into that position, he is resurrected as a new man, a distinctive man, a different man. Whatever his social status in London, in the New World he is a gentleman. More gentle; more man. Because the site of his transformation is within rawness. He is backgrounded by savagery.”