SMALL KINDNESSES by Danusha Laméris

Danusha Laméris SMALL KINDNESSES I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walkdown a crowded aisle, people pull in their legsto let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”when someone sneezes, a leftoverfrom the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.And sometimes, when you spill lemonsfrom your grocery bag, someone else will help youpick them up. Mostly, we …

Liberation – Lilla Watson

“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” – Lilla Watson/ Aboriginal activists group in Queensland in the 1970s

Dominator culture – bell hooks

Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.” bell hooks, Teaching Community

Caste is structure – Isabel Wilkerson

“Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like. Caste is a living, breathing entity.”Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Art might do something. It’s dangerous. – Toni Morrison

There are some very powerful contributions to knowledge in the scientific world or the legal world, but art is singular. That’s why every dictator gets rid of the artists first. They burn the books and execute the artists first. Then they get on with whatever else they’re interested in. Art might do something. It’s dangerous. Toni Morrison

The precise role of the artist – James Baldwin

The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place. – James Baldwin, The Creative Process