36 quotes
Part of peace-making is acknowledging that we can’t know everything about ourselves, and sometimes we reveal things to others that we are not ready to accept.
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)
While unrecovered trauma is so often a prison of inflexibility, some people do have choices about how to respond. And someone else might make that shift possible by daring to imagine what to us may feel unimaginable. Which can be love.
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)
The privileged are often good at articulating injury but not always able to identify if they are actually experiencing it. There is a difference in being able to recognize the conditions under which injury has or is happening, and actually living, or having lived through it.
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)
We are suffering, and if we could all acknowledge that suffering has content, we could all understand, as a community, somewhat better how to help each other.
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)
Feminism, or full and complete personhood for women, is an idea. And each human being has to do the work to explore it, build a relationship to it, and understand what their own changes must be in order to be part of it.
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)
At the 2008 Lambda Literary Awards (the awards the LGBT community gives to books ignored by straight book awards) not a single lesbian book nominated for best novel was published by a mainstream press. Our literature is disappearing at the same time we are being told we are winning our rights. How can we be equal citizens if our stories are not allowed to be part of our nation's story?
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012)
Never, ever decide that you know who someone is, what they did, their objective, context or goal, how they feel or what they know, until you ask them. And not asking means a direct investment in not understanding the truth.
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)
In a healthy educational forum, students engage materials regardless of agreement or comfort level and then analyze, debate, critique, and learn from them, addressing the discomfort as well as the text.
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)
It is our moral obligation as human beings who share this time and this place to not punish, but rather to remain calm, to open up communication, and to place our hands gently on each other’s shoulders and say, “Think twice.”
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)
Change requires awareness to propel a transformation of attitude. Once there is even a glimmer of awareness, it implies the ownership of an injustice, and a consequential responsibility for its solution, which must be expressed through behavior, not just feeling.
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)
While perfection is never achievable, positive change is always possible. Resolution doesn’t mean that everyone is happy, but it does mean that perhaps fewer people are being blamed for pain they have not caused, or being cast as the receptacle of other people’s anxieties, so that fewer people are dehumanized by false accusation.
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)
When anxiety is at the wheel, we tragically project, blame, and then separate. We flee reality, which is the fact of conflict as part of life, rather than confront difference and expand our understanding of ourselves.
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)
Being conscious about one’s own traumatized past experiences, and how they manifest into current traumatized behavior, can be a force for awareness of one’s own reactions, not a means of justifying the repression of information.
The police are often the least likely people to be able to solve problems, to think in nuanced ways about emotional pain and its projections, and as a result are not the people we need help from if we are interested in creating peace.
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)
Palestinians are, today, among the most victimized, scapegoated, and attacked people in the world. I watch as their suffering and mass murder is propagandized through pervasive dehumanized representations that falsely position them as “dangerous” when, in fact, they are the ones endangered and in desperate need of outside intervention.
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)
Every person needs to be parented. By this I mean that every person needs to be helped, encouraged, and supported in becoming accountable to themselves and others. To not be threatened by taking other people into account. To not be frightened of difference.
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)