檳榔嶼

- Redemptive love was often thought of in terms of the boundless love of a divine will powerful enough to enable the oppressed and exploited to find their way to freedom, to survive, and to triumph.
- Marktin Luther King : Love justice above all else, in such a way that we would be willing to give our lives to be free, he demanded that we move beyond the world of politics into a transcendent spiritual place of meaningful sacrifice.
  - This call to sacrificial love was different from the notion of loving God as a balm soothing the hurts of unjust torture and suffering. It was different from the Christian notion of forgiving and loving one's enemies.
  - It was a call to stand for justice and freedom with one's whole heart, body, mind, and spirit.
- We need a progressive, transformative vision of social justice that would combine the wisdom of a successful nonviolent, love-based freedom struggle with the insights of a direct-acion, decolonizing movement for black self-determination and liberation.
- A militaristic, imperialist, white supremacist nation wholeheartedly committed to colonizing the world "by any means necessary" understood fully that if violence was the order of the day the state would always prevail.
- Both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were assassinated at the point when they began to hone a truly revolutionary vision of liberation, one rooted both in a love ethic and the will to resist domination in all its forms. They did not live long enough to fully integrate the love ethic into a vision of political decolonization that would offer practical guidelines for the eradication of black self-hatred, as well as strategies for building a diverse beloved community.
- Wounded in that space where we would know love, black people collectively experienced intense pain and anguish about our future. The absence of public spaces where that pain could be articulated, expressed, shared meant that is was held in - festering, suppressing the possibility that this collective grief would be reconciled in community even as a way to move beyond it and continued resistance would be envisioned. Feeling as though 'the world had come to an end', in the sense that a hope had died that racial justice would become the norm, a life-threatening despair took hold in black life.
  - It set the stage for the takeover of poor black communities by a drug economy which brought in its wake a hedonistic ethos of violence, consumersim, and amoral pursuit of pleasure powerful enough to usurp and destroy the foundations of communalism, a love ethic, and a belief in the healing power of forgiveness, faith, and compassion.
- The greatest testament to the lovelessness that has taken over diverse black communities is the constant presence of meaningless, brutal, and senseless violence.
- As long as black leaders wrongly encourage black men, and all black people, to believe our collective wounds can be healed by the establishment of black patriarchal rule, we are doomed.
- While we are right as black citizens to challenge and critique white supremacist biases in education, it does not serve the interests of black students to convince them that they have nothing to learn from anyone who is white.
  - It denies the incredible gift offered us by anti-racist white people who have sacrificed time, safety, prestige, and in some cases their lives in the struggle to end white supremacy.
- To show compassion for one's enemies, to be able to love them, meant that one would necessarily need to be rooted in self-love.
- Having also abandoned a love ethic when it comes to the issue of social justice, most unenlightened white citizens respond with rage at the suggestion that the nation must atone to its black citizens for the unique genocidal assaults experienced in the past and present day.
  - Every white person who has committed themselves to anti-racist struggle understands that there is no shame to be had in assuming accountability for the collective wrong done black people by the agents of white supremacy, most of whom have been and are white.
  - Indeed, assuming responsibility and accoutability empowers.
- Marianne Williamson, <<The Healing of America>> : "There are those who would point to blacks who have behaved criminally or dysfunctioally, and try to use that as a justification for not performing our ethical duty toward the African-American community. Or, conversely, one can point to black stars who have triumphed, and try to claim that because they have made it big in America, that proves there's no real problem. But neither argument is valid. Every group of people has its shadow element, and every group of people has its geniuses. Neither is an excuse for failing to do what needs to be done."
  - A love ethic is the only foundation for transformative renewal of ourselves and our nation.
- Visionary black leaders abound in our society; many of them are women. Patriarchal thinking blocks recognition of the power of female wisdom and our words.
  - Contemporary black women leaders know that we can only heal the crisis in our diverse black communities by returning to a love ethic which stands in opposition to all forms of domination, including white supremacy and sexism.
  - It will be pure tragedy if sexist thinking combined with internalized racism keeps individuals from partaking of all the wise teachings that offer us a path to healing and salvation.
- It is no accident that just as visionary anti-sexist black women were finding a voice and making that voice heard, the dominant culture renewed its focus on patriarchal masculinity.
  - White supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal leaders know who benefits most from the disrespect and devaluation of black female wisdom.
  - Were our black leaders in the past and/or present fundamentally anti-patriarchal, black people would be in a different place today. We would be celebrating the oppositional spirit of solidarity and equality, communalism, and love of justice that has been our legacy.
- Money alone will never heal the wounds of black America. As long as white supremacy remains the order of the day, we must always work to control our representations, to offer a progressive vision.
  - Returning to love and a love ethic can provide every black person with the strength to survive with dignity and passion, no matter what their economic lot in life. It can empower us to create communities of resistance that can eliminate all forms of violence in our neighborhoods: the violence of addiction, of physical abuse, of emotional torture.
  - Simple things like ceasing to watch television, refusing mindless consumption, engaging in positive thinking, learning how to read and write, and learning how to think critically are among the myriad ways we can practice love in action, a redemptive love that can heal wounded spirits.
- We begin our journey with love, and love will always bring us back to where we started. Making the choice to love can heal our wounded spirits and our body politic.
  - It is the deepest revolution, the turning away from the world as we know it, toward the world we must make if we are to be one with the planet - one healing heart giving and sustaining life.
  - Love is our hope and our salvation.