Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“The vast majority of African-Americans who lived in this land in the first 246 years of what is now the United States lived under the terror of people who had absolute power over their bodies and their very breath, subject to people who faced no sanction for any atrocity they could conjure.”

“Slavery made the enslavers among the richest people in the world granting them "the ability to turn a person into cash at the shortest possible notice." But from the time of enslavement Southerners minimized the horrors and to which they had grown accustomed. "No one was willing," [Edward] Baptist wrote, "to admit that they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture" ”

“It made lords of everyone in the dominant caste, as law and custom stated that "submission is required of the Slave, not to the will of the Master only, but to the will of all other White Persons." It was not merely a torn thread in "an otherwise perfect cloth," wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg. "It would be closer to say that slavery provided the fabric out of which the cloth was made.”

“Slavery in this land was... an American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant caste and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences."

“But in the same way that individuals cannot move forward, become whole and healthy, unless they examine the domestic violence they witnessed as children or the alcoholism that runs in their family, the country cannot become whole until it confronts what was not a chapter in its history, but the basis of its economic and social order.”

“Americans are loath to talk about enslavement... because what little we know about it goes against our perception of our country as a just and enlightened nation, a beacon of democracy for the world. Slavery is commonly dismissed as a "sad, dark chapter" in the country's history. It is as if the greater the distance we can create between slavery and ourselves, the better to stave off the guilt or shame it induces.”

“To their astonishment, I began to be able to tell who was high-born and who was low-born among the Indian people among us, not from what they looked like, as one might in the United States, but on the basis of the universal response to hierarchy — in the case of an upper-caste person, an inescapable certitude in bearing, demeanor, behavior, a visible expectation of centrality.”

“We cannot understand the current upheavals or most any turning point in American history without accounting for the human pyramid encrypted into us all. The caste system, and the attempts to defend, uphold, or abolish the hierarchy, underlay the American Civil War and Civil Rights movement a century later and pervade the politics of twenty-first century America.”

“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance.”

“Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions.”

“"My ancestors never attacked indigenous people, never owned slaves." ... Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.”

“We in the developed world are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even. Many people may rightly say, "I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past..." ”

“What humanity learned, one would hope, was that an ancient and hardy virus required perhaps more than anything, knowledge of its ever-present danger, caution to protect against exposure, and alertness to the power of its longevity, its ability to mutate, survive and hibernate until reawakened. ... the wisdom of... never underestimating their persistence, was perhaps the most effective antidote, for now.”

“Above all, and more vexing for humanity at large, was the sobering message of 2016 and the waning second decade of a still- new millennium: that rising heat in the earth's oceans and in the human heart could revive long-buried threats, that some pathogens could never be killed, only contained, perhaps at best managed with ever-improving vaccines against their expected mutations.”

“In Beloved, Toni Morrison famously writes, "Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another." She nods toward a process by which our liberation is both found and operated within. You may very well find the Table, but when will you take the first bite? Will you look up and really see yourself?”

“You can’t talk someone into their liberation. Telling someone to just get free is like telling someone to stop grinding their teeth in the night. It is not kindness. Freedom requires patience with ourselves, as it takes time to feel at peace if all you’ve ever known is insecurity. It’s the process of your soul learning to trust again—trust that it can rest and love and be still without being destroyed.”

“To be liberated spiritually is to commune with and seek God without fear of alienation if we do not reach the same conclusions as our neighbor. It is to become spiritual creatives. Who are we that we would demand certainty or clarity of mystery?”

“A life that is holy is a life that allows for all of your uncertainties, your curiosities and unbelief. That doesn’t just allow for them but holds them as sacred. Spirituality that is not permitted these liberties is merely subjugation. It is not in protection of the divine; it is in protection of fragile people who are unable to allow spiritual freedoms without their own spirituality feeling threatened.”

“Whenever I become uncertain of which direction liberation lies in, I ask myself to tell the truth. Not that I am capable of comprehending what any ultimate Truth is. But I am capable of at least telling the truth about what I believe to be true—my inmost convictions, desires, or even an embodied revelation. The truth that rattles in my bones.”

“And there are also voices who deeply love us but are unable to exist in the tension of who we are and what we believe and who they desire us to be and what they desire for our beliefs. This is the life of a human, particularly a human with any concern for belonging or survival—we are dragged with such a force in so many disparate directions that our souls, disoriented, are unable to find their way back to center.”

“There will always be people who are threatened by freedom in another person. Who have something to gain from our bondage.”

“Traditionally, Western Christianity has replaced Christian habits of storytelling with singular and all-encompassing testimonies of a person’s conversion to faith. This is sad to me. We must recover a habit of very specific story exchange and shared memory if we are to have robust liberation.”

“Few would deny that storytelling is core to what it means to be human.”

“To have artifacts that possess our memories ... grants memory a body, something physical that you can grab hold of. I think this helps a person to feel in control of their past. But it also makes it so that others can bear witness to the memory themselves, experience it in their own way. When a person or group has no artifacts to reconstruct their stories, things slip away across generations. People slip away.”

“The truest memory is rarely the one that survives. In most of our contexts, intellectual, charismatic, white, heterosexual, cisgender men will carry some weight subconsciously as keepers of the history. It is important to name this tendency, for it has been systemically ingrained in us by societies that value their wealthiest, most visible, or most power-possessing members.”

“There are times when belonging is not cemented in the lived moment of an experience but in the lively or somber retelling of the moment afterward. Which means we can transfer belonging to the next generation by welcoming them into memories that they (or we) have not lived but choose to steward.”

“I think the whole Bible is predicated on collective remembrance. You have feast and fast days, storytelling, and most conspicuously, the Eucharist. A shared table and a shared loaf. Take, eat, drink. The Christian story hinges on a ceremony of communal remembrance. This should train us toward an embodied memory.”

“When my friend’s father, who has Alzheimer’s, forgets a face or loses his place in time, I have always found it so tender that my friend does not immediately correct him. Sometimes, he’ll just stay with his father in whatever memory he is able to occupy. This is solidarity. ... Memory is frail. It requires a delicate touch, a tenderness.”

“As joy gives way to dreaming, our hope becomes more and more secure. We begin to believe that what is will not always be, that the ache will not always linger. And we may even begin to believe that we are worthy of what we are hoping for.”

“For some, contentment bears the risk of complacency. But there is a contentment that can be active in the world. This can be a joy that still dreams, but it dreams in peace, not in terror.”