books
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I now think that those two accomplices–guilt and shame–are probably together the most corrosively painful scourges the human spirit can experience. Precisely because they always and only stem from one’s own failure to keep faith with one’s truest self. With one’s private conscience, one’s most cherished and basic principles, with one’s sense of honor. For…
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Sometime in the late 1930’s, the government in another of its persistent and futile attempts to suppress African cultural survivals, decided that the colony would more easily be governable if drums and other traditional musical instruments were outlawed. The colonials must have sensed, and correctly, the importance of music in the cultural independence and political…
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“From a young age, even the children had their appropriate responsibility. I cannot remember exactly at what age it first fell to me, but my duty was to clean the chicken coop each week. And those chickens were prolific in more than eggs, which is why later, whenever I’ve heard anyone derogatively described…
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The freedom that matters most is how we feel inside about ourselves. Prisons, ghettos, concentration camps, barrios, favelas, colonies can restrict mind and body, kill both, but until the spirit is extinguished, the possibility of freedom lives. Freedom’s about choices. The self-grounded, self-motivated decision to imagine (create) a range of choices and the resolve to…
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Originally posted on word pond: Palestine 2012 — Gaza and the UN resolution, by Noam Chomsky
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Even though I love that the fact that it is no way, shape or form landlocked, Boston has never been my favorite place to live. I’ve never been able to put my finger on exactly why. We (the city and I) have simply been at odds. Despite that fact, I currently reside in Greater Boston;…
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I have been deficient. The deficiency is particularly sad because I, an African woman, should be further along in meeting the African reading challenge than I am. To be honest, most of my current reading is research for my next book but still… Therefore, after I finish the book I”m currently reading, A City So Grand,…
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Originally posted on The Crunk Feminist Collective: The author on the move in Harlem. I am no athlete. I have not won an individual sports competition since maybe the second grade. I recall Usaining all comers in the 40-yard dash but, as Kasi Lemmons learned us, “memory is a selection of images, some elusive, others…
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Reflecting on the absence of work within the frame of U.S. environmentalism, Richard White explains, “Environmentalists so often seem self-righteous, privileged, and arrogant because they so readily consent to identifying nature with play and making it by definition a place where leisured humans come only to visit and not to work, stay, or live” (173).…
Tichaona Chinyelu 