“The rich world which [the enslaved] of the Caribbean created to protect themselves...is crucial to understanding how news, ideas, and social excitement traveled in the electric political environment of the late eighteenth century.”
“We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know.”
“Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going inside ourselves.”
“Racism was at base the belief in the inheritable reality of race itself - an idea trussed up in the language of science and, as such, every bit as much a product of Western culture as, say, a painted mask was the product of the Kwakiutl. When there was no evidence for a theory, Boas had suggested in The Mind of Primitive Man, you had to let it go — especially if that theory just happened to place people like you at the center of the universe. Otherwise, what you called science was nothing more than nonsense on stilts.”
“The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city’s old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the powers of a high school athlete.”
“Search results are records, and the records of human activity are a matter of tremendous contestation; they are a battleground over the identity, control, and boundaries of legitimate knowledge. ”
“Acting in a tribal way simply means being willing to make a substantive sacrifice for your community— be that your neighborhood, your workplace, or your entire country.”
“...everyone who comes to therapy worries that what they think or feel might not be “normal” or “good,” yet it’s our honesty with ourselves that helps us make sense of our lives with all of their nuances and complexity.”
