Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“His sense is a force that flows: not a willed domination, a thought-out, calculated choice, but rather a kind of natural resource, already present, a Niagara Falls waiting to spill over as soon as he is in a position to possess "absolute control over the lives of others." ”

“Bailyn’s summation of Dunbar’s character and located in how Dunbar feels “within himself.” Let me repeat: "feeling…a sense of authority and autonomy he had not known before, a force that flowed from his absolute control over the lives of others, he emerged a distinctive new man, a borderland gentleman, a man of property in a raw, half-savage world." ”

“Earlier I said that cultural identities are formed and informed by a nation’s literature, and that what seemed to be on the mind of the literature of the United States was the self conscious but highly problematic construction of the American as a new white man.”

“In that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. And what rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and rationalize external exploitation was an Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire—that is uniquely American.”

“the rights of man... upon which the nation was founded, was... yoked to Africanism...allied with another seductive concept...hierarchy of race. As Orlando Patterson has noted, we should not be surprised that the Enlightenment could accommodate slavery; we should be surprised if it could not. The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery.”

“Romance, an exploration of anxiety imported from the shadows of European culture, made possible the embrace...of...specific... American fears: the fear of being outcast, of failing, of powerlessness; of boundary-less-ness, of Nature unbridled and crouched for attack; of the absence of so-called civilization; of loneliness, of aggression both external and internal. In short, the terror of human freedom...”

“After all, one way to benefit from the lessons of earlier mistakes and past misfortunes was to record them—an inoculation against their repetition, as it were.”

“Many times, when people are told they have caused harm, a defensive, self-protective impulse kicks in.”

“The path of repentance is one that can help us not only repair what what was broken, to the fullest extent possible, but to grow in the process of doing so.”

“We are each, in a thousand different ways, both harm doer and victim. Sometimes we are hurt. Sometimes we hurt others, whether intentionally or not.”

“Addressing harm is only possible when we bravely face the gap between the story we tell about ourselves... and the reality of our actions. ”

“Owning the harm we have done involves risk. And for many of us it involves not a trivial amount of fear. It can be tempting to try minimize the impact of our behavior or justify it withe reasons (there are always reasons!)... ”

“The critical fifth and last stage of this process is that the perpetrator must, when faced with the opportunity to cause similar harm in the future, make a better choice. This can happen only if they've done the deep work of understanding why the harm happened, stayed out of situations that would make the harm easy to perpetrate again, and reoriented themselves and their life in a totally different way.”

“Step Five: Making Different Choices. The work of repentance, all the way through, is the work of transformation. ... It's about figuring out how to be the kind of person who sees others' suffering and takes responsibility for any role we might have in causing it.”

“the victims needs must be centered in the process”

“Step Four: Apology. Making amends and accepting consequences open up the fourth step in this process, apologizing for the harm caused. I hope it will be clear by this point that a generic apology crafted by a publicist and posted on Instagram won't make the cut; rather, the focus here is on what the victim receives rather than what the perpetrator puts out.”

“And though Maimonides doesn't say this explicitly, I think part of the amends process involves also humbly accepting the fact that actions have consequences.”

“one does not amends at the person but to them"

“Step Three: Restitution and Accepting Consequences ... Repair work isn't really repair if the only thing that's changed is the perpetrator. Despite the fact that Maimonides hasn't yet, deep as we are into his Laws of Repentance, explicitly mentioned the victim of harm, his approach to repentance is, I believe, profoundly victim-centric.”

“Public apologies and statements of intent aren't meaningful if harm is still being perpetrated. Indigenous sovereignty is still being treated as "inferior and unequal" in many ways in Canada...Indigenous people have criticized ... Harper's apology and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission framed harm against Indigenous people as something that happened in the past, as though it has no bearing on ongoing relations”

“The goal here isn't merely making amends. It's transformation.”

“Maimonides ... doesn't spell out his thinking explicitly, but I think he was trying to tell us that apologies, and even amends and reparations, don't truly have the needed effect if the work to become different isn't already underway. And again, that work isn't just internal; it must manifest in external actions—different choices, even small ones, already being made. ”

“There was much more to make the trip worth the risk. The habit of genuflection would be replaced by the thrill of command. Power—control of one’s own destiny—would replace the powerlessness felt before the gates of class, caste, and cunning persecution. One could move from discipline and punishment to disciplining and punishing; from being socially ostracized to becoming an arbiter of social rank.”

“Young America distinguished itself by pressing... toward a future, a freedom, a kind of human dignity believed to be unprecedented in the world. A whole tradition of "universal" yearnings collapsed into that well-fondled phrase "the American Dream." While the immigrants’ dream deserves the exhaustive scrutiny… it is…important to know what these people were rushing from as it is to know what they were hastening to.”

“It seems to me both poignant and striking how the effect of racialism on the subject has been avoided and unanalyzed. The scholarship that looks into the mind, the imagination, and the behavior of slaves is valuable; equally so is a serious intellectual examination of what racial ideology did and does to the mind, the imagination, and the behavior of the master.”

“Evasion has fostered another, substitute language in which the issues are encoded and made unavailable for open debate. The situation is aggravated by the anxiety that breaks into discourse on race. It is further complicated by the fact that ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, liberal, even generous habit. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference; to maintain its invisibility...”

“The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be relegated to the margins of the literary imagination. It may be that American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity because of and in reference to this unsettled and unsettling population.”

“thinking for some time now about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as "knowledge." This "knowledge" holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, unformed by, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of first Africans and then African Americans in the United States”

“The United States of America, for example, has never reckoned deeply with its enslavement of people of African descent, so the country continues to find opportunities to commit the same sins of white supremacy again and again and again: from slavery to lynchings, from Jim Crow to redlining, from mass incarceration to voter suppression. ... the patterns are undeniable.”

“Step Two: Starting to Change... "What is complete repentance? The [case of) one who had it in their power to repeat a transgression, but separated themselves from it and did not do it because they had repented." That is, true repentance happens at the moment when a person comes into a situation similar to one in which they had previously committed harm, and this time, do it right.”