American mainstream is obsessed with black creative genius – be it music, walk, style – but at the same time puts a low priority on the black social misery which is the very context out of which that creativity flows.
I always felt called to serve, to empower and ennoble as many people as I could, teaching, truth-telling, exposing lies, bearing witness, and being willing to live and die for something bigger than yourself.
I’ve been blessed, I think, to have tremendous joy in my life in pursuing my vocation, my calling.
Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.
When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots. They can’t get away with their abuse. They can’t get away with subjection. They can’t get away with subjugation. They can’t get away with exploitation. They can’t get away with domination. It takes courage for folk to stand up.
Frederick Douglas’s agenda was an agenda, not for black people to get out of slavery. It was for America to become a better democracy. And it’s spilt over for women’s rights; it’s split over for worker’s rights and so forth.
Why I can’t stand this phrase about I don’t have any permanent enemies, any permanent friends, only permanent interests. I can’t stand that. It’s a matter of principles. What kind of integrity, what kind of morality do you have?
We’re all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time – that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity.
All individuals have the same value, not to be determined by market price. They’re made in the image and likeness of God.
Truth is fine. Absolutely.
It’s so easy to begin to demonize someone you think is so far removed and as the demonization begins to expand, it ends up being everybody but your friends. After a while everybody else but you. That is a slippery slope that is so easy to slide down, and that’s what is dangerous.
Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher – for any human being, I think, in the end. Courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope.
Be willing to learn, because none of us know the truth.
Every empire suffers from hubris, arrogance and condescension, and therefore a moral blindness. That’s true of the American empire, it was true of the British Empireearlier, and it will certainly be true of the Chinese Empire in the future.
I’m not romanticizing black people, because we’ve got gangsters like everybody else.
I would want to conceive of philosophy as grounded in the very long humanist tradition that is the best of the West, which is open to the East and North and South.
I have a whole lot of fun in trying to serve others and just keeping it funky, trying to keep it real, trying to ensure that we are able to be ourselves and get beyond these deodorized discourses and deodorized spaces that put on masks.
To be human you must bear witness to justice.
I believe that all of us have gangster proclivities and greedy orientations that need accountability. That’s why democracies are necessary. We have to have institutions to try to curtail the use of arbitrary power so that our greedy orientations and gangster-like proclivities don’t get out of hand.
This is what it is for Asians to be part of – support affirmative action, even though it may be against their interest, but they feel it’s a matter of justice.