Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Without the rights of representation and participation, in the public sphere, can the subject ever be a citizen in the true sense of the term? If the colonized citizen is prevented from exercising his or her collective and communal agency as a full and equal member of civil society, what kind of shadow does that throw on the public virtue of the French republic?”

“French colonial policy acknowledges the naked right of the colonized as individual—divested of cultural differences—to be identified as a citizen of the republic. But there exists, at the same time, a discriminatory denial or disavowal of the colonized citizen's right to be represented and recognized as a culturally clothed subject who may not conform to the norms and practices of French civil society.”

“The fear of instability and disequilibrium between freedom and fealty, as I have described it, is evident in the history of colonial Algeria. Citizenship becomes the unstable, unsustainable psycho-affective site in the conflict between political and legal assimilation, and the respect for, and recognition of, Muslim ethical and cultural affiliations.”

“On the one hand, France is the supreme bearer of universal Rights and Reason... on the other, its various administrative avatars—assimilation, association, integration—deny those same populations the right to emerge as "French citizens" in a public sphere of their own ethical and cultural making. The principle of citizenship is held out; the poesis of free cultural choice and communal participation is withheld.”

“If one chooses to understand the colonial system," Albert Memmi writes in The Coloniser and the Colonized, "he must admit that it is unstable and its equilibrium constantly threatened." The civilizing mission is grounded in a profound sense of instability — not a surmountable or sustainable "contradiction" — as the French Republic gazes anxiously upon its own mirror image as a world power.”

“The colonized, who are often devoid of a public voice, resort to dreaming, imagining acting out, embedding the reactive vocabulary of violence and retributive justice in their bodies, their psyches: "To blow the colonial world to smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every colonized subject." ”

“It is the Manichaean mentality that goes with such racial-cultural discriminations, and the economic divisions set up to accommodate and authorize them, that create the violent psycho-affective conditions that Fanon describes in The Wretched of the Earth. The colonial vocabulary is shot through with arrogance, antagonism, and anxiety: those hysterical masses; their blank faces; this vegetative existence.”

“the racialized person is seen as a threat, an infection, a symptom of social decline: "...dissected under white eyes... pick up the catch phrases strewn over the surface of things... the peculiarity of regimes of racial oppression that they make immediately visible and vivid the more mediated and abstract practices of power such as class division, the exploitation of labor, and social hierarchies of status.”

“The time is right to reread Fanon, according to David Macey, his most brilliant biographer, because "Fanon was angry," and without the basic political instinct of anger there can be no hope for "the wretched of the earth [who] are still with us. What hope does Fanon's anger hold for us today?”

“To have Fanon uphold the view that the building of national consciousness demands cultural homogeneity and the disappearance or dissolution of differences is deeply troubling Is he not dangerously outdated?”

“Did Fanon's ideas die with the decline and dissolution of the black power movement in America, buried with Steve Biko in South Africa, or were they born again when the Berlin Wall was dismembered and a new South Africa took its place on the world's stage? Questions, questions... ”

“A colonized person must constantly be aware of his image, jealously protect his position, Fanon said to Sartre. The defenses of the colonized are tuned like anxious antennae waiting to pick up the hostile signals of a racially divided world. In the process, the colonized acquire a peculiar visceral intelligence dedicated to the survival of body and spirit.”

“Stevens pointed an accusing finger directly at public education's more well-to-do critics, including "the industrious, thrifty, rich farmer" and especially the farmer who had inherited his wealth, "whose fat acres have descended to him, from father to son in unbroken succession." Such people, Stevens regretted, "can scarcely feel any sympathy with, or understand the necessities of the poor."”

“New England's taxpayers made all that possible, Stevens continued, because they understood the necessity of supporting institutions such as schools that might not necessarily serve them directly. He regretted that so many in his adopted state lacked that understanding, "complain[ing] of the school tax not so much on account of its amount, as because it is for the benefit of others and not themselves."”

“on April 11, 1835, he took the floor of the state House to explain that common schools for all were essential building blocks of good government, preparing the citizenry to exercise the franchise knowledgeably. Those schools were also essential in order to share widely the benefits of prosperity and to avoid humiliating the poor. Stevens urged Pennsylvania to follow the example of his native New England...”

“Stevens saw a positive role for government. So in 1834 he supported in the Pennsylvania legislature a law creating a system of public ("common") schools funded by state revenues. Such a system, he expected, would further reduce the likelihood of classes hardening into castes; it could enable "the poor man's son," once schooled, to "far outstrip and bear off the laurels from the less industrious heirs of wealth."”

“A corollary evil for him was hatred, contempt, or condescension toward the poor. The "aristocracy of the most odious and insolent kind," he held, was "the aristocracy of wealth and pride." The capitalism that Thaddeus Stevens idealized was a humane and legally egalitarian and humane one.”

“"When I reflect," he said in the 1830s, "how apt hereditary wealth, hereditary influence, and, perhaps, as a consequence, hereditary pride are to close the avenues and steel the heart against the wants and the rights of the poor, I am induced to thank my Creator for having, from early life, bestowed upon me the blessing of poverty." ”

“One of Stevens's oft-noted characteristics was a pronounced and lifelong sympathy for the disadvantaged and mistreated. As another colleague later put it, "nature had given Mr. Stevens a generous heart," so "he seemed to feel that every wrong inflicted upon the human race was a blow struck at himself." ”

“[honest] men "were very few indeed." He would invoke that view publicly at the end of his life in a shorthand explanation of the nation's decades-long "depart[ure] from the principles of the Declaration of Independence" in tolerating slavery and racial inequality for so long. That had occurred, he summarized, because "man still is vile "”

“... "a mind which instantly and clearly comprehended" any problem at hand and a "strength of judgment" that quickly produced "a sound solution." Stevens's manner of speaking, moreover, was both "eloquent and curt" and "impressed the force of his convictions" upon his listeners. Even a longtime political opponent conceded his skill at "present the strong points of a case in a more powerful manner" ”

“Stevens doubtless took his reading assignments seriously. In those books he would encounter strenuous efforts to grapple with the Enlightenment's challenge to religion. That took the form not of demanding blind faith in received doctrine but of asserting that human reason was not only perfectly compatible with belief in God and acceptance of Christianity but led naturally to belief and acceptance.”

“Joshua and Sarah apparently named their second son after Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Polish-Lithuanian soldier who had joined the American fight for independence. More tellingly, Thaddeus long remembered his family's regard for the revolution's most egalitarian document, the Declaration of Independence. From his "earliest youth," he would later recall, he was taught to read it and "to revere its sublime principles."”

“Vermont's constitution was the first in North America to condemn the enslavement of human beings. Echoing and elaborating upon the Declaration of Independence, its preamble announced that "all persons are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent, and unalienable rights, amongst which are the enjoying and defending life and liberty...." ”

“Fawn M. Brodie's 1959 psycho-biography of Stevens expressed appreciation for his efforts on behalf of African Americans. But even she attributed to the man "an arbitrary righteousness mingled with cynicism" and a neurotic perfectionism. "For it is in the nature of the crusader," Brodie wrote, "--the radical, the Jacobin, the revolutionary, the true believer: call him what you will-that he is never sated.... "”

“"He did not play the courtier," as one congressman observed, and "he did not flatter the people; he never was a beggar for their votes." He also became a shrewd and skillful parliamentarian, using the rules of procedure to outmaneuver congressional opponents.”

“Thaddeus Stevens owed his high visibility and effectiveness not only to the substance of his views but also to a number of personal qualities and skills. He displayed an iron will and great courage, moral as well as physical, repeatedly refusing to bend before opposition, cower before threats, or grovel or pander for voter support.”

“As Thaddeus Stevens understood, uprooting slavery meant overthrowing the economic system in half the United States, a labor system that underpinned the wealth and political power of the South's elite and that nourished much of the South's social and cultural life. Emancipation would therefore constitute a social and political revolution of tremendous dimensions and consequences.”

“"while the majority about him saw but dimly its proportions." Stevens, it conceded, "realized the necessity of bold, strong measures, while others clung to hopes of pacification and compromise. He was one of the few who are not afraid to grasp first principles and lay hold of great truths, or to push them to their remotest logical result."”

“Over the course of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln grew impressively into the role of leader of the Second American Revolution, moving to confiscate and then emancipate Confederate slaves and to bring black men into Union armies. But at each stage of Lincoln's evolution, he found Thaddeus Stevens marching ahead of him, pushing for further advances.”