I am excited to have a black president because white supremacy is real and it needs to be shattered.
It would just be nice if we had leaders in Washington who could unequivocally take a stand on behalf of democratic movements in other parts of the world. And even this is true for even Brother Barack Obama.
Pleasure, no matter how desirable, is never innocent: it’s always presupposing and assuming a certain kind of social order, one usually shot through structures of domination.
We had a much deeper sense of community in ’67 than we do in ’97. This is important to say that not in a nostalgic way because it’s not as if ’67 was a time when things were so good.
Hey, you got something going here. I think we’ve got a chance for some progressive policy that actually focuses on poor and working people.
Hatred of injustice is not the same thing as a love for everyday people.
Poor people and working people have not been the focus of the Obama administration. That for me is not just a disappointment but a kind of betrayal.
We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail.
Every president needs to deal with the permanent government of the country, and the permanent government of the country is Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats and the questions becomes what is the relationship between that president and Wall Street.
I’m not saying that President Obama should be exempt from criticism, nor do I believe it is some act of racial treason for a black person to hold our president accountable for his actions.
A black agenda is jobs, jobs, jobs, quality education, investment in infrastructure and strong democratic regulation of corporations. The black agenda, at its best, looks at America from the vantage point of the least of these and asks what’s best for all.
The condition of truth, is to allow suffering to speak. Which means attend to suffering of the least of these, of the orphan, the widow, the poor, the working people, the gay brother, the lesbian sister, the transgender, the black people.
It’s true that you might be socially isolated because you’re reading in the library, at home and so on, but you’re intensely alive. In fact you’re much more alive than these folk walking the streets of New York in crowds, with no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all.
The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison – you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive.
Life is such a mysterious thing that you are up one day; you are down the next day. A lot of the homeless brothers and sisters who were a success ten years ago, they are now on the street. Maybe ten years later they will be a success, but the crucial question is what is the quality of their life.
There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.
One is that I am a regular, everyday person, you know what I mean. I feel that wherever I am, I really am.
Philosophy is fundamentally about how you come to terms with living your life and trying to do it in a wise manner, and, for me, that means decently and compassionately and courageously and so forth.
You can see it in terms of the obsession on Wall Street with not just profits but greed, more profit, more profit.
The wonderful thing about the black church for me is that it forces you to come to terms with the centrality of love in the world.