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Belonging: A Culture of Place QUOTES

Belonging: A Culture of Place QUOTES

1 " We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

2 " With reciprocity all things do not need to be equal in order for acceptance and mutuality to thrive. If equality is evoked as the only standard by which it is deemed acceptable for people to meet across boundaries and create community, then there is little hope. Fortunately, mutuality is a more constructive and positive foundation for the building of ties that allow for differences in status, position, power, and privilege whether determined by race, class, sexuality, religion, or nationality. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

3 " Industrial capitalism was not simply changing the nature of black work life, it altered the communal practices that were so central to survival in the agrarian south. And it fundamentally altered black people's relationship to the body. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

4 " The free thinking and non-conformist behavior encouraged in the backwoods was a threat to imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy hence the need to undermine them by creating the notion that folks who inhabited these spaces were ignorant, stupid, inbred, ungovernable. By dehumanizing the hillbilly, the anarchist spirit which empowered poor folks to choose a lifestyle different from that of the state and so called civilized society could be crushed. And if not totally crushed, at least made to appear criminal or suspect "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

5 " We must all decolonize our minds in Western culture to be able to think differently about nature, abut the destuction humans cause. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

6 " There are a few if any public spaces where black folks can express fear of whiteness, be it engendered by rational or irrational states of mind. However, white fear of blackness gains a constant hearing. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

7 " Living away from my native place I became more consciously Kentuckian than I was when I lived at home. This is what the experience of exile can do, change your mind, utterly transform one's perception of the world of home. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

8 " We are born and have our being in a place of memory. We chart our lives by everything we remember from the mundane moment to the majestic. We know ourselves through the art and act of remembering. Memories offer us a world where there is no death, where we are sustained by rituals of regard and recollection "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

9 " When we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

10 " To me the family has always been that place of familiarity that holds and hurts us. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

11 " To tend the earth is always then to tend our destiny, our freedom and our hope. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

12 " Nature was th eplace where one could escape the world of man made constuctions of race and identity. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

13 " Erasing the agrarian past wherein black folks worked the land, sustained our lives by growing and tending crops, was a way to deny that there were any aspects of life in the white supremacist South that was positive. At the end of nineteenth century the cultural myths that made freedom synonymous with materialism necessarily denied the dignity of any agrarian based life style. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

14 " What has become clear is that education for critical consciousness coupled with anti-racist activism that works to change all our thinking so that we construct identity and community on the basis of openness, shared struggle, and inclusive working together offers us the continued possibility of eradicating racism. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

15 " ...if we think of the natural landscapes that surround us as simply, blank slates, existing for humans to act upon them according to our will then we cannot exist in life sustaining harmony with the earth. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

16 " ...we must consistently challenge dehumanizing public representations of poverty and the poor. Restoring to our nation the understanding that people can be materially poor yet have abundant lives rich in engagement with nature, with local culture, with spiritual values is essential to any progressive struggle to halt mountaintop removal "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

17 " The earth, like all of nature, could be life giving but it could also threaten and take life, hence the need for respect for the power of one's natural habitat. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

18 " Estrangement from our natural environment is the cultural contest wherein violence against the earth is accepted and normalized. If we do not see earth as a guide to divine spirit, then we cannot see that the human spirit is violated, diminshed when humans violate and destroy the natural environment. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

19 " We must seet a value in life that is above and beyond profit motives. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place

20 " From the moment of their first meeting, Native American and African people share with one another a respect for the life-giving forces of nature, of the earth. African settlers in Florida taught the Creek Nation run-aways, the "Seminoles," methods for rice cultivation. Native peoples taught recently arrived black folks all about the many uses of corn. (The hotwater cornbread we grew up eating came to our black souther diet from the world of the Indian.) Sharing the reverence for the earth, black and red people helped on another remember that, despite the white man's ways, the land belonged to everyone. "

― , Belonging: A Culture of Place