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Stones of Contention QUOTES

Stones of Contention QUOTES

1 " It reminded me of an idea the late American novelist James Baldwin posed in various ways over the course of his career: "As long as you think that you are white, there is no hope for you." Perhaps equally relevant is that he never said "As long as you think that you are an antiracist white, there is some hope for you. "

― , Stones of Contention

2 " Those flirting with the idea that our generation might be the one to end racism have a tremendous hubris, an ignorance of the complexities involved, and a tragically flawed imagination of the phenomenon as a metaphysical substance to be "stamped out" rather than an ever-present complex of observable behaviors throughout multicultural societies that inflates or deflates according to circumstances. "

― , Stones of Contention

3 " Tethering one's pedagogy to notions of social justice and activism affords an automatic claim to moral superiority and, by extension, social legitimacy, which most undergraduate students cannot readily distinguish from intellectual competency. "

― , Stones of Contention

4 " The prevailing vision of history, as an egalitarian pageant of equally valid, self-authenticating "perspectives" on the past representing the "voices" of particular groups, is dangerous to society at large. It reserves a special place for everyone, which is exciting news for political extremists, con-artists, and megalomaniacs eager to register their self-interested propaganda as legitimate contributions to a "broader perspective" of history. "

― , Stones of Contention

5 " To me, the political right appears as a largely unexplored country inhabited by a pantheon of brilliant black scholars whose works do not "matter" to a left-leaning academy that chooses racial hypocrisy over intellectual diversity. "

― , Stones of Contention

6 " I could never forget how excited I felt, as a student of anthropology in the early 1990s, to be entering a field that promised to mitigate racism in America. I fantasized about working alongside Indians to pursue deeper understandings of our colonial-era pasts as we gleefully dismantled whatever ideological machinery prevented us from truly seeing one another in the present. It was a noble and poetic vision which carried a generic promise of "making a difference" in the world. What I failed to foresee was that ideological machinery being ironically maintained by a morally elite stratum of antiquarians, archaeologists, and Indians in the twenty-first century. "

― , Stones of Contention

7 " Archaeology's calling card - the masonry trowel - does not necessarily inspire joy among people who see it routinely used to systematically dissect their ancestral places. In such contexts, it is not at all difficult to see archaeology as an instrument of settler colonial oppression. "

― , Stones of Contention

8 " There is no shortage of [American] Indians today, only an apparent surplus of miseducated settler colonists. "

― , Stones of Contention

9 " The remarkable idea of a privileged socioracial group benevolently lifting a less privileged one should always be met with remarkable skepticism. If this were so when the Massachusetts Bay Colony put the words "Come Over and Help Us" in an Indian's mouth, perhaps things would be different today. "

― , Stones of Contention

10 " It would be reassuring to presume that publicly casting oneself as a "good guy," specifically in regard to [American] Indians, is a harmless action without complicated side effects, as if society is not largely a system of complicated side effects set into motion by the actions of individuals. "

― , Stones of Contention

11 " Guilt, in principle, is simply not among the things baby humans can inherit. However, white settler colonial guilt is a horse of a different color. "

― , Stones of Contention

12 " I call this brand of racial paranoia white settler colonial guilt. Its rise in recent years may superficially resemble karma or poetic justice to those with leftist sensibilities. But anyone concerned with the well-being of society should recognize that it is merely yet another mechanism by which human individuality is suppressed and group preconceptions are reinforced. "

― , Stones of Contention

13 " Nobody is entitled to a history that makes them feel good about themselves or the groups to which they belong. "

― , Stones of Contention

14 " I fear that when enough people rally to the identitarian visions of their choice, and when enough of the remaining population becomes too afraid to engage them with honesty and reason, the democracy that maintains a space for both will collapse. "

― , Stones of Contention

15 " I see the rhetorical question "Who Owns the Past?" so frequently used by humanities and social science professors to provoke classroom discussions as needlessly and erroneously planting the idea that a living group of people could "own the past." Surely, any such claim should be taken no more seriously than the cast of Sesame Street should they claim to "own the alphabet. "

― , Stones of Contention

16 " Telling people what they want to hear may not help them in the long run, though it usually helps the tellers in the short run. This is common sense. But many of today's academics do not think and act like common people. "

― , Stones of Contention

17 " In the fashion of an alcoholic hitting rock-bottom, perhaps it is high time for Americans to confront a dangerous paradox that has been hanging in our collective blind spot for far too long: how do we pour over race, day in and day out, without unwittingly internalizing its ideology? "

― , Stones of Contention