Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Sami. I grew up as the mixed-race child of a white single mother in a small, Catholic town in Kentucky. I went to twelve years of Catholic school. This shaped a lot of who I am today, growing up around no people of color, no out queer people, no women of color with bodies shaped like mine—I struggled with my racial and sexual identities as well as with eating disorders growing up, but I was blessed to have a mother who knew I was different and wanted to support my interests in reading and writing. One summer, she signed me up for a creative writing camp at a nonprofit in Cincinnati called Young Women Writing for (a) Change. In some ways, the origins of who I am today started there. I was already a writer, but there I discovered feminism, deep listening, safe space, and authentic voice. I attended camps throughout high school and assisted with the girls’ camps. Later, in college, I continued to teach there, and I led writing circles inspired by that work during graduate school as well. Growing up, though, I always had this sense that some other way of living was possible, so even though I tried to envision a life like those around me, I was pretty sure I was going to leave. I came out in college, developed my relationship to Blackness, engaged in activism, and encountered disability studies. This next stage shaped my academic path to an MFA in poetry and a PhD in gender studies with a focus on Black feminism and disability studies. But the most current version of me has been vastly shaped by my graduate school experiences with queer community, BDSM, and polyamory. Through these spaces I have come to embrace myself as a fat Black queer sexual being whose desires and politics can exist happily alongside one another. amb. We’re gonna get to the BDSM and polyamory, but I am curious about what made you tune into the realm of disability? You mention encountering disability studies, and I am curious about why it particularly sparked your interest.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I share this piece as a reminder (to both the reader and myself) that inherent in the noble search for new directions in BFT is the diffident, exciting, uncertainty of that new-new—that tricky, impolitic thing that positions itself precariously on the firm foundation of black feminist intellectual labor and a destabilizing, clearly crunk willingness to strip the house down [to] it[s] structural beams, if necessary. Like all successful renovation projects, it is driven by love, newly identified needs and a tacit preparedness to do violence to whatever came before it. This is not a comfortable or easily habitable space. Like my co-contributors to this volume, I pacify myself with hope that the ends will justify the means. All the women are white; all the men are black … but are all the blacks are African-American? The enquiry that catalyzed my search for a black feminist politics of pleasure came, unwittingly, from a graduate student at Stanford. I’d been invited by the university to have a public conversation on hip-hop and feminism with Dr. H. Samy Alim commemorating the tenth anniversary of my book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks it Down. After 10 years of writing/discussing/living/breathing hip-hop and feminism, I could hardly imagine a question I hadn’t already answered in some form or another, but suddenly there it was: virginal, terrific and tongue-tying: “Could you speak a bit about the ways your Caribbean-ness plays in shaping your theorization of hip-hop feminism, specifically your engagement with the erotic?” Like most terrific questions, it was one I had yet to think about—and certainly not in the context of my feminism. I knew intuitively that there was no “neat answer” to where the Caribbean-ness in my hip-hop feminist self began and ended. Any attempt would require less of an answer than a story—and one that does not easily recognize the geo-political convenience of borders, processes of citizenship or nationalities. Like the transnational imaginary that the hyphen implies, the alleged margins—Caribbean, American, hip-hop, feminist—continuously shift and do so with problematic fluidity. Rather than delineating the specifics of its stops and starts, I’d come to understand both my identity and my feminism as a ting that bends and leans, intersects and divides, stops h’an drops h’an bubbles and wines. I also knew that my commitment to hold the erotic front and center in hip-hop feminism was a deliberate one. But the question being asked required a specific accounting for elements routinely ignored in BFT—namely pleasure, the erotic and US black multi-ethnicity. It required mining what Caribbean rhetorician Professor Kevin A. Browne describes as the space between the Caribbean and the American—and when it comes to BFT there was no politics of articulation around that.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Take responsibility for your part of this fractal existence, and cultivate pleasure and joy in your life, knowing that authentic pleasure is good for the whole human system. Be absolutely committed to your process, to doing what you are doing in the best way you possibly can. Be detached from any outcomes. Be satisfiable. Learn what enough feels like in your body; don’t settle, don’t overindulge. You are a miracle. Act like it. Don’t waste it. 132 Meditation starter kit: Download the Insight Meditation app, start with a minute a day. Use the guided meditations if you find them useful. Read books by Thich Nhat Hanh, Angel Kyodo Williams, Pema Chodron.133 Ella Baker taught us that “we who believe in freedom cannot rest.” Ella Baker, untitled speech (Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party nominating convention, Jackson, MS, August 6, 1964). I wrestle with these words all the time, because I believe in freedom and I believe my body is a crucial part of the fight for freedom. So I interpret these words through my work. I do not rest in terms of how I work. I tirelessly show up for movements I believe in, to hold planned or unexpected hard conversations and mediations, to invite transformation in the face of frustration. I tirelessly seek out old and new ways of moving through our current paradigm and into a viable future. But when it comes to my body, I rest. I rest in myriad ways that allow me to show up fully for each facilitation. I ensure that I have quiet time each evening, a bath when there’s a tub, at least seven hours of sleep each night. I want to give us more permission to rest our bodies so that we don’t burn out our spirits and minds in our lifelong commitment to liberation.section six: Outro, Thank YousOutroI have begun to see pleasure activism all around me. When I originally conceived of this book, it was a different time for me, for the United States, and for the world. So much existed under the veil of politeness, functionality, a narrative of order and rules. Struggle wasn’t absent by any means, but if you had privilege you could avoid a lot of the violence, terror, and misery. As I am writing this book, every single day contains multiple all-hands-on-deck political, economic, and/or spiritual crises. There have been days when I doubted if this book still made sense as the next offer I wanted to make to the world. I would dismiss myself, try to dedicate myself to more “serious” things. And then pleasure would save my day or my week or my life. Pleasure reminds us to enjoy being alive and on purpose. Again and again I have realized that our misery only serves those who wish to control us, to have our existence be in service to their own. Again and again I have had to surrender to the truth and freedom of pleasure.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  So after the Battle of the Trench, when the Qurayzah had put the entire settlement at risk by plotting with Mecca during the siege, Muhammad showed no mercy. In accordance with Arab custom, the seven hundred men of the tribe were slaughtered and the women and children sold as slaves. The other seventeen Jewish tribes remained in Medina, and the Quran continued to instruct Muslims to behave respectfully to “the people of the book” (ahl al-kitab) and stress what they all held in common. 18 Even though the Muslims sentenced the tribesmen of Qurayzah for political rather than religious reasons, this atrocity marked the lowest point in the Prophet’s career. From then on, he intensified his diplomatic efforts to build relationships with the Bedouin, who had been impressed by his military success, and established a powerful confederacy. Bedouin allies did not have to convert to Islam but swore merely to fight the ummah’s enemies: Muhammad must be one of the few leaders in history to build an empire largely by negotiation. 19 In March 628, during the month of the hajj, Muhammad announced, to everybody’s astonishment, that he intended to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, which, since pilgrims were forbidden to carry weapons, meant riding unarmed into enemy territory. 20 About a thousand Muslims volunteered to accompany him. The Quraysh dispatched their cavalry to attack the pilgrims, but their Bedouin allies guided them by a back route into the sanctuary of Mecca, where all violence was forbidden. Muhammad then ordered the pilgrims to sit beside the Well of Hudaybiyyah and wait for the Quraysh to negotiate. He knew that he had put them in an extremely difficult position: if the guardians of the Kabah killed pilgrims on sacred ground, they would lose all credibility in the region. Yet when the Qurayshi envoy arrived, Muhammad agreed to conditions that seemed to throw away every advantage the ummah had gained during the war. His fellow pilgrims were so horrified that they almost mutinied, yet the Quran would praise the truce of Hudaybiyyah as a “manifest victory.” While the Meccans had behaved with typical jahili belligerence when they tried to slaughter the unarmed pilgrims, God had sent down the “spirit of peace” (sakina) upon the Muslims. 21 Muhammad’s first biographer declared that this nonviolent victory was the turning point for the young movement: during the next two years “double or more than double as many entered Islam as ever before,” 22 and in 630 Mecca voluntarily opened its gates to the Muslim army. Our main source for Muhammad’s life is the Quran, the collection of revelations that came to the Prophet during the twenty-three years of his mission.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I believe in transformative justice—that rather than punishing people for surface-level behavior, or restoring conditions to where they were before the harm happened, we need to find the roots of the harm, together, and make the harm impossible in the future. I believe that the roots of most harm are systemic, and we must be willing to disrupt vicious systems that have been normalized. I believe that we are at the beginning of learning how to really practice transformative justice in this iteration of species and society. There is ancient practice, and there will need to be future practices we can’t yet foresee. But I believe that with time it must become an incredible pleasure to be able to be honest, expect to be whole, and to know that we are in a community that will hold us accountable and change with us. I am in this practice in as many spaces as I can be in my life. I believe that transformative justice is actually a crucial element in moving toward the kind of large-scale societal healing we need—transformative justice is a way we can begin to believe that the harm that has come to us won’t keep happening, that we can uproot it, and that we can seed some new ways of being with each other. I also believe that I am not creating the ideas in this book but observing a beautiful pattern of pleasure shifting the ground beneath us, inside us, and transforming what is possible between us. I have learned from so many teachers living and dead. To that end, I have an extended section of this book that is lineage, tracing the streams that are flowing into this particular river in ways that I hope create common ground, even a common titillation, between you and me. Finally, I am constantly discovering new parts of myself to bring into the light, and that feels like an essential aspect of pleasure activism. I am discovering things as I write this book, and I will keep discovering things afterward. As I gather this book together I am sitting in a quiet house, off season, on Martha’s Vineyard. Right now, I am watching two massive swans slowly extend their long necks, bobbing in icy water, reaching toward each other, equal parts tentative and persistent. It is that energy in me as I take the tentative steps into this realm of the erotic, of the sensual, and ask us to explore together all of the power we potentially wield together.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Despite what I think is an accelerated pace. Like you said, it’s uncovering, it’s being revealed, it was always right there at the surface. I think it’s a little more accelerated too because some of these right-wing people are getting righteous. They’re like, I’ve been waiting to just show you my real colonizer self.43 But what I’ve been most moved by, especially working at an intergenerational political organizing center in New York City, is a newer generation of organizers and an older generation of organizers coming together and saying, “What are we going to build? What are we going to create?” And that to me is the erotic as power. That is understanding that we are collectively capable of calling on ancestral traditions for our resilience and also building some new shit. Knowing that we have made mistakes, what we have learned from them, how do we transform sexual violence, how do we transform state violence, how do we transform criminal violence? And no, wait, let’s take a moment to reflect, to release what we want to release and understand that we can choose what we desire. And we could choose what we want to build. And it doesn’t have to come from this place of scarcity and fear. And I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it in the imagination and creation of our organizing. Of our political work. Of putting our bodies on the line against fascism, our queer bodies, trans, lesbian, gay, bi, two-spirit bodies. I feel inspired. amb. I do too. And having a different level of conversation about risk. I don’t think that she even uses the word “risk.” But Audre Lorde talks about how we are providing energy for change. And considering the erotic as a source of power and information. Like this is, we are, constantly communicating what is possible. And people are also identifying the level of risk they are willing to take. It does feel different to me, a different kind of measurement or temperature check, or assessment of who can be up front, who’s in the back, who’s in the middle, who’s on the side. And that can transform. You can alternate. You can shift roles. You don’t have to be the same person, in the same line, every time. We can metamorphosize as we’re doing this. This feels very powerful to me. This is what I’m witnessing. I’m not saying it hasn’t happened before. But it’s happening now. This is a moment.

• From My People (2022)

  And many of the other indignities Blacks suffered because of separate and far from equal. And while I hope that the young people for whom this book was written will be informed by this history and the value of fighting for what you believe in, I hope they will also appreciate the words of the philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Look around the United States today and listen to some of the vir ulent rhetoric of the immigration debate or at some of the not-so-veiled racism in politics and public discourse and think about what they are doing to a country that once identified with the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Are these words still relevant to the increasingly Black and brown homeless, tempest-tossed, huddled masses yearning to breathe free? And what will it take to make those words a reality for them, and to help all Americans realize the possibilities of the American Dream? Whatever it takes, there are lessons from the civil rights movement that may inform a new generation. Not to sit in at lunch counters or to go on Freedom Rides, but to determine their own path, emboldened by the victories of young people like themselves at a different time. It is my hope that To the Mountaintop will, in the words of the late Edward R. Murrow, “illuminate, educate, and inspire.” Today’s Horrors Are Yesterday’s RepeatsThe Vineyard Gazette JUNE 22, 2017 Sometimes I have to abandon my journalistic training and resort to cliches—such as what goes around, comes around. From a recent memorial service in the nation’s troubled capital to a museum in Siena, Italy, there were messages that spoke to the cliche. At the memorial service for Roger Wilkins, he was remembered for being a part of the prize-winning team at the Washington Post that covered the abuses of power by members of the Nixon administration, coverage that led to articles of impeachment and the resignation of Nixon. Now, decades later, there is talk of impeachment again, much of it arising from dogged reporting by the Washington Post (and of course my alma mater, the New York Times ). Roger was also remembered by Cecelie Counts for his support of her and those in the Free South Africa Movement who demonstrated in front of the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C., to end apartheid in South Africa, where the black majority were victims of an oppressive white regime. Roger also eventually played an important role in Nelson Mandela’s leadership of the new, nonracial South Africa.

• From My People (2022)

  It is the tradition that takes South Africans to the grave site of a departed one to speak about whatever problems they may be having, in the belief that wisdom will come from one who is now an ancestor, and who lives forever. EpilogueReasons for Hope amid America’s Racial UnrestPBS NewsHour JULY 1, 2020 Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Despite the unity seen in Black Lives Matter protests, Americans have often been portrayed as being woefully divided on most major subjects. But David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, has been insisting even before recent events that this country is more united than divided. You surely know David from the NewsHour ’s weekly “Shields and Brooks” segment each Friday. But, in another role, he’s been reaching out to Americans of all stripes to understand how they’re feeling in these uncertain times. David Brooks, thank you so much for joining us. David Brooks: Oh, it’s so great to be with you. Charlayne Hunter-Gault: You know, you have written columns in the past few months saying that the country is more united than divided. Who were you talking to, and what was leading you to that conclusion, that we’re more united than divided? David Brooks: I put out a plea to my readers, and 6,500 sent me essays about how they were doing. And a lot of them were in bad shape. And yet, when I spoke to them over the weeks and over the months, they were super impressed by how their neighbors were showing up for each other. And the things they talked about over and over again was: My local restaurant is now giving away food. My local church is now a soup kitchen. My neighbors are showing up for me. And there was a sense that the country was actually acting for each other. And so I think there was a feeling—especially in the first few weeks of the pandemic, a feeling of common action and common purpose and common vulnerability. Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Has there been anything else, as a result of the pandemic, that has made people come closer together or realize they were more united than they thought? David Brooks: The reaction to the Floyd murder has been, on the whole, a very good news story. I look at the marches, and there was some violence in the begin ning, but the violence has gone down now. They were not a Black uprising. They were an American uprising. Charlayne Hunter-Gault: What’s the solution to making the unity last? David Brooks: I think the first thing we have to do is learn from each other and talk to each other. My rule is—the more uncomfortable the conversation is, the more I learn from it. And so I’m hoping the first thing we do is make use of this moment of useful discomfort to face realities in our country and to face each other.

• From My People (2022)

  Ruby Bridges: We cannot be a hopeless people. We have to be hopeful. And we do have a lot of work to do. I mean, we all saw that. This last election showed us just how divided this country really is. After President Obama was elected, it seemed that racism really raised its ugly head again. I think having a Black man elected as president just riled that element up all over again. Probably, they felt like, oh, we cannot have this happen. And yet it did. And so all we needed is for someone to come along and add fuel to that fire. And I think that that’s why we are so divided today. Charlayne Hunter-Gault: One of the things that you say in the book is you believe that racism is—let me read this—“a grown-up disease.” You’re talking to the children now, the young people. You say: “We adults must stop using you, our kids, to spread it. It’s we adults who passed racism on in so many ways.” I hear people all the time saying, well, I want to do something about this, but I don’t know what to do. Ruby Bridges: We all know that none of our kids are born knowing anything about disliking the child sitting next to them. Our babies don’t come into the world knowing anything about racism or disliking someone because of the color of their skin. It is learned behavior. And I believe that, if it can be taught, it can be taught not to—not to be that way. Charlayne Hunter-Gault: You mentioned your children. You had four Black boys, and your eldest was involved in an unsolved murder. What is your advice to mothers like yourself and also to those protesting the murders of Black men especially, but also Black women? Ruby Bridges: That is a parent’s worst nightmare. My son’s murder was never solved. We do know that the people that actually took his life looked exactly like him. You know, there are so many parents out there, like myself, who have lost children my son’s age or even babies by gun violence, which is very—very disheartening. That is an issue that we have to deal with as well. Whether it’s the murders, like the murder that happened with my son, or murders like George Floyd, if you are passionate about that, then you need to do something about it. Charlayne Hunter-Gault: I’m very impressed with your passion and moved by it. And I imagine there might be a part of your book that is a favorite of yours. Is there any place that you could share with us? Ruby Bridges: Yes, I have it right here. I will definitely do that. “When I think about how great this country could be, America, land of the free, home of the brave, I think about what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said about being great. Everybody can be great because everybody can serve.

• From The Art of Memoir

  But the more I wrote, the more I discovered that innocence had never left me, if you measure innocence as a capacity for belief— particularly a belief in love. What was mine in terms of hope and sweet longing had been with me all along—still, in some ways, is. In Lit, I was also bedeviled by letting present knowledge block out clear memories of the past. I just couldn’t stop seeing my marriage except colored by our divorce, and I wrote the same pages over and over, not making stuff up, but canting the material one way, then another. At first I wrote events that cast him as perfect and me as a drunken slag. Then I wrote him as an icy WASP and myself as a tender heart. None of it rang emotionally true to me. I despaired. I even considered giving back the advance, which I’d have had to sell my apartment to do. Then after meditation one day, when I’d prayed for the seventh month running for some glimpse of the truth, I had a vivid flash of us young and in love, floating in inner tubes down a Vermont river the week we met. How tender we’d been. The memory brought a stab of pain almost physical—I’d avoided writing about how in love we were, brimming with hope. It had been far easier to make glib, jokey remarks about how shitty a wife I’d been. Dumb hope is what it hurts most to write, occupying the foolish schemes we pursued for decades, the blind alleys, the cliffs we stepped off. If you find yourself blocked for a period, maybe goad yourself in the direction of how you hoped at the time. Ask yourself if you aren’t strapping your current self across the past to hide the real story.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  And to me, the Audre Lorde Project is very much centering wellness and safety. And I think it is the same question to keep asking ourselves: how do we center creation and desire as integral to liberation? That is a question we’re going to have to keep asking ourselves. Because this world begs of us to be, to move out of scarcity, move out of fear, move out of crisis, and not imagine anything abundant or transformed, not to move out of desiring one another and being desired as powerful, fully living beings. amb. Yes. There’s this concept of suffering central to so many of us as whatever, activists, organizers, anyone trying to change the world … so much of how we get pulled into community and kept in community is a solidarity built around our suffering … which is not liberatory. That’s just not it. It’s not us. The suffering is not what we’re called to attend to. That’s happening all the time. What does it mean to transcend it and make it so that: I can’t settle for this? This has nothing to do with me. This doesn’t have anything to do with us. I think about that a lot: what does it take to actually shift the feel of organizing? The way we feel our existence? We’re not meant to suffer alone. We’re meant to experience pleasure and togetherness. So I just wanted to ask you, how are we present in our collective bodies? How are we present and excited and letting the erotic come open in us today? Especially when it makes sense to respond with a lot of fear right now, and yet the call of the erotic, of the yes, is still clarion. It’s still so available. Even now. Even as the suffering gets bigger. I keep saying, I don’t think things are getting worse, I think they’re getting uncovered. This is the unveiling, and at the end of the unveiling, we have nakedness. And that nakedness calls for new desire. So how do we perceive what this is, what we are as humans right now? And how can we really feel the love for what we are now? I guess the main question inside all of that, when you think about setting down suffering work, or awakening something that is more compelling than suffering, where do you see that happening in your world and work today? Cara. I know that I have been talking a lot about fascism and dictatorships and that all of these things existed before Trump, during Trump, after Trump, so how are we pushed to our edges to imagine creation? How is desire about full-on creation?

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Radical honesty. No omissions, no white lies, no projections. Ask the questions you really want answered, speak your truth, and let the relationship build inside all that reality. Just a note from experience, the small lies can be the hardest to stop telling. “No, I don’t want to get on the phone right now, can we just text?”113; “I’m busy catching up on my reality TV show”; “Real cow milk ice cream”; or “I know I said I didn’t want to ___, but now I do.” However, the more you practice this, the more you will find yourself spending your waking hours in the ways you want to, the ways that honor the miracle of your existence, which was not given to you to waste in polite avoidance of hurting people’s feelings. You will find that you can be honest and kind; you can be honest and compassionate. Acknowledge the dynamics, then keep growing. Have an understanding on the front end of the race, class, gender, ability, geographic, and other power dynamics that exist between you. And also remember that these are mostly constructs. Be in the complexity of living inside these constructs while evolving beyond them through relationship. Relinquish Frankenstein. You are not creating people to be with or work with, some idealized individuals made of perfect parts of personality that you discovered on your life journey. You are meeting individuals with their own full lives behind and ahead of them. Stop trying to make and fix others and instead be curious about what they have made of themselves. For this book I’m adding a few pleasure-specific practices that I’ve learned for liberated relationships: Create your own normal. How often do you pleasure each other? What are your go-to moves, positions? What are your growing edges? What do your bodies love? What agreements and safe words and safe sex practices work for y’all? What is the pace by which you want to deepen your connection or commitment? All of this should be up to you and your lover/partner/s—don’t live in the misery of comparative relationships. Normal is a myth! There are as many ways to love, desire, please, and be pleased as there are bodies, minds, and imaginations. Line up your longings. Chemistry is a special thing, beautifully mysterious. What is less mysterious as we get older are the things that we enjoy doing with our bodies and our lives. Learn how to name your longings and to assess if your longings are aligned with a potential lover, partner, friend, or group. This is the place where we can do the most unlearning work around how most of us are taught to date—you know, that game of “hunting” and “catching” each other and then compromising in order to get to the marriage end goal? No, my loves, don’t start with compromise and cunning, start with alignment and grow from there.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Dallas. Yes. But their role is to take that but then also using the art of MCing to make light and make it accessible. Every funeral has some of the funniest jokes and laughter. That’s the transformative nature of humor and comedy. I think it really heals us and helps us let go. Anger is extremely powerful. And it can transform amazing things. But it also has its obstacles. It sets up walls. The counterbalance to that is laugher. And we have to not be afraid to use that. amb. I study somatics and what happens in the body. It’s like trauma gets stuck in the body, and it just stays there waiting for you until you release it. And I think we always think, oh, that release has to be weeping for days or whatever. But I’ve experienced some of the biggest releases of my life actually in laughter. There’s a collective aspect. Where with crying it’s something you often go off and do alone, laughter you do with others too. In the conversations we’re in about decolonization and taking Indigenous leadership … we have been in this conversation forever, since first contact. At a certain point, if Indigenous people can’t laugh at white folks in their learning process … that seems like one of the ways that y’all are able to stay in relationship. Dallas. I mean, the colonial experience is nothing unique to us as Native people. It’s worldwide. So there’s that connective tissue between all of us. So using that experience, transforming it into something funny and really exposing it for how dysfunctionally funny it is, it helps. It breaks down those barriers between our communities and brings us together. I see something that’s so dysfunctional, I’m like, that shit’s hilarious in its own way. There’s the construct of what a Native man is. What we as Indian people, how we’ve constructed what an Indian man is … is hilarious. And the comedy that we do, that’s probably our biggest target, ourselves. Because we do such hilarious, stupid shit that … let’s call it that, show the absurdity of dysfunction. amb. Yes. And there’s some unlearning that can happen there, right? We don’t have to take ourselves so seriously because so much of this is a construction. And we can reconstruct it.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  It turns out, being present is the most important part of every single experience in my life. It turns out, every other human being is also wired in these ways, entire systems shaped by pain and pleasure. And I can grant others the same autonomy I am learning to wield on my own behalf—how I spend my life is my decision, based on all kinds of data coming from my body. And I can grant others the same level of complexity and contradiction as I am learning to embody—we are all multitudes in process. We get to have boundaries. We get to have longings and articulate them. We can begin to imagine a society coordinated around honest, clearly articulated longings. At the end of the Somatics and Trauma course, I was invited into teacher training, to become part of the community that brings embodiment to new students, new geographies, and social movements. I have been learning and teaching for eight years as of the writing of this book. Last year we brought the course to Detroit for the first time, and it was an incredible experience to share this liberation technology with a place that has given me so much, with people I love and am growing with. It was also thrilling to grow skills with Detroit and midwestern and southern organizers who often get overlooked by efforts based in New York City or the Bay. I can already feel the impact in the community of having more organizers who can feel themselves, who have been practicing returning to center and moving toward longing, all of us organizing ourselves around what we long for rather than what we are against. I believe somatics, in coursework and/or bodywork, is one of the most effective ways to get a group of complex, contradictory humans into alignment with a liberated collective future. Seeing, feeling ourselves, as we are, with agency to shape the future … that’s the miracle. 76 “What Is Somatics?,” Generative Somatics, http://www.generativesomatics.org/content/what-somatics.77 It was much later that I read the book Healing Sex, written by one of my somatics teachers, Staci Haines. It’s really helpful and has all this homework for the reader to do, to learn your landscape of sexual trauma, to move toward healing. I highly recommend it. See Staci Haines, Healing Sex: A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2007).Black Woman WildnessA Spell Junauda Petrus Junauda Petrus is a soul sweetener, filmmaker, writer, runaway witch, cosmic bag lady, and cofounder at Free Black Dirt. [image file=image_rsrc3KV.jpg] Some summers ago, I was going through a hard and breathtaking breakup. The kind where I was carrying on crying, listening to Bilal on repeat, puffing all the trees. The fatigue of sadness left me an emo hermit in fetal position in my bed. It was my first relationship with a woman after coming out to myself fully in my early thirties, and my nose may have been a little wide open. Just a little.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In religious history, the struggle for peace has been just as important as the holy war. Religious people have found all kinds of ingenious methods of dealing with the assertive machismo of the reptilian brain, curbing violence, and building respectful, life-enhancing communities. But as with Ashoka, who came up against the systemic militancy of the state, they could not radically change their societies; the most they could do was propose a different path to demonstrate kinder and more empathic ways for people to live together. When we come to the modern period, in Part Three, we will, of course, explore the wave of violence claiming religious justification that erupted during the 1980s and culminated in the atrocity of September 11, 2001. But we will also examine the nature of secularism, which, despite its manifold benefits, has not always offered a wholly irenic alternative to a religious state ideology. The early modern philosophies that tried to pacify Europe after the Thirty Years’ War in fact had a ruthless streak of their own, particularly when dealing with casualties of secular modernity who found it alienating rather than empowering and liberating. This is because secularism did not so much displace religion as create new religious enthusiasms. So ingrained is our desire for ultimate meaning that our secular institutions, most especially the nation-state, almost immediately acquired a “religious” aura, though they have been less adept than the ancient mythologies at helping people face up to the grimmer realities of human existence for which there are no easy answers. Yet secularism has by no means been the end of the story. In some societies attempting to find their way to modernity, it has succeeded only in damaging religion and wounding psyches of people unprepared to be wrenched from ways of living and understanding that had always supported them. Licking its wounds in the desert, the scapegoat, with its festering resentment, has rebounded on the city that drove it out. Part One BEGINNINGS 1 Farmers and Herdsmen Gilgamesh, named in the ancient king lists as the fifth ruler of Uruk, was remembered as “the strongest of men—huge, handsome, radiant, perfect.” 1 He may well have existed but soon acquired a legendary aura. It was said that he had seen everything, traveled to the ends of the earth, visited the underworld, and achieved great wisdom. By the early third millennium BCE, Uruk, in what is now southern Iraq, was the largest city-state in the federation of Sumer, the world’s first civilization. The poet Sin-leqi-unninni, who wrote his version of Gilgamesh’s remarkable life in about 1200 BCE, was still bursting with pride in its temples, palaces, gardens, and shops.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Pleasure activism is not about generating or indulging in excess. I want to say this early and often, to myself and to you. Sometimes when I bring up this work to people, I can see a bacchanalia unfold in their eyes, and it makes me feel tender. I think because most of us are so repressed, our fantasies go to extremes to counterbalance all that contained longing. Pleasure activism is about learning what it means to be satisfiable, to generate, from within and from between us, an abundance from which we can all have enough.16 Part of the reason so few of us have a healthy relationship with pleasure is because a small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating a false scarcity and then trying to sell us joy, sell us back to ourselves. Some think it belongs to them, that it is their inheritance. Some think it a sign of their worth, their superiority. On a broad level, white people and men have been the primary recipients of this delusion, the belief that they deserve to have excess, while the majority of others don’t have enough … or further, that the majority of the world exists in some way to please them. And so many of us have been trained into the delusion that we must accumulate excess, even at the cost of vast inequality, in order to view our lives as complete or successful. A central aspect of pleasure activism is tapping into the natural abundance that exists within and between us, and between our species and this planet. Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for; it is the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous. So rather than encouraging moderation over and over, I want to ask you to relinquish your own longing for excess and to stay mindful of your relationship to enough. How much sex would be enough? How high would be high enough? How much love would feel like enough? Can you imagine being healed enough? Happy enough? Connected enough? Having enough space in your life to actually live it? Can you imagine being free enough? Do you understand that you, as you are, who you are, is enough? Glossary Why a glossary? Language changes so quickly these days. The right way to speak about people, about identities, about gender, about geography—everything is in motion on a regular basis. I know that in writing this book I am creating something instantly dated. Given that god is change, there are some terms in this book that I want to be super clear about. Bitch is one of my favorite words. When I say it, I mean you are fierce, I love you, wow, that’s the boss, be yourself, yes yes yes.

• From Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999)

  death to life—from the life of “this age” to the life of the body of Christ. 3. Paul, the most important of the Jews who preached the message of Christ to the Gentiles, taught his congregations to think of themselves as “the body of Christ,” a community whose head was Christ, from whom they drew their life (1 Cor. 12). 4. Hence to believe in Christ and to be baptized was to be “incorporated” into Christ, and to share His life and Spirit. 5. The Gospel of John uses a similar image: Christ is like a vine, and those who believe in Him are like branches who live and grow in Him. 6. Paul uses a bold version of this image to suggest that believers in Christ are “grafted” into the people of Israel, so that Gentiles may share in the covenant between God and His people (Romans 11). 7. Through faith the community of believers thus shares in the life of the risen Jesus and the expectation of a resurrection like His—i.e., the hope of everlasting life. III. The Divine Identity of Jesus A. Jesus as Lord 1. The proclamation that “Jesus is Lord” seems to have been central to early Christian preaching, along with “God raised him from the dead.” 2. This proclamation implies the pre-eminence of Jesus over other heavenly or cosmic powers. 3. When brought into the discourse of the Scriptures of Israel, it implies some kind of unity between Jesus and the LORD God of Israel, such that the honor due to the LORD alone can be given to Jesus too. 4. This is implicit in an early Christian hymn quoted by Paul (in Philippians 2:5–11) which applies to Christ language that had been reserved in the Scriptures for the LORD God of Israel (cf. Isaiah 45:23). 5. The implication at the end (Philippians 2:11) is that glory given to Jesus is glory given to the LORD. B. The Son of Man and the Throne of God ©1999 The Teaching Company. 39

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  This, right here, is an origins tale.58 A deliberate, black, feminist, once upon a time that details one of three preliminary but critical pit stops on my theory-making journey to a black feminist Politics of Pleasure. Part of my current project, “Pleasure Politics” is a multi-pronged effort that includes my dissertation, my public-intellectual work and two years of critical intellectual labor with “The Pleasure Ninjas”: journalist and playwright Esther Armah and Drs. Yaba Blay, Brittney Cooper, Treva B. Lindsey and Kaila Story—a collective I founded in 2013 during my tenure as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. As black feminist theorists, we’ve made a commitment to reframe the existing narrative about black female sexuality by positioning desire, agency and black women’s engagements with pleasure as a viable theoretical paradigm. “Pleasure Politics” asks: What possibilities can a politics of pleasure offer for black feminist futures? Specifically, how can deepening our understanding of the multivalent ways black women produce, read and participate in pleasure complicate our understanding of black female subjectivities in ways that invigorate, inform and sharpen a contemporary black feminist agenda? Getting to black feminist pleasure is tricky business. As my mentor historian E. Frances White said to me when I initially shared this endeavor, “You, do know that feminists are allergic to pleasure, right?” She was joking. Kind of. This is not to suggest that Black Feminist Thought (BFT) has shied away from the topic of black female sexuality. In fact, holding the United States accountable for a sordid history of legally and culturally sanctioned rape and gender violence against black women has long been a priority in BFT’s agenda. Indeed, a great deal of energy has been spent disputing deeply entrenched and dehumanizing stereotypes—ranging from our uniquely mammified asexuality to our naturally animalistic, wanton and licentious ways. The corrective has been the creation of a black feminist master narrative in which black women’s damaged sexuality takes center-stage as a site of reoccurring trauma—the place where intersecting oppressions can be counted on to meet and violently coalesce. The upside, of course, was a sorely needed, compassionate rendering of the difficult and compromised space black women’s sexuality occupies. The downside has been a mulish inattentiveness to black women’s engagements with pleasure—the complex, messy, sticky, and even joyous negotiations of agency and desire that are irrevocably twinned with our pain. From academia to the blogosphere, we’ve become feminist fluent in theorizing the many ways in which our sexuality has been compromised. We’ve been considerably less successful, however, moving past that damage to claim pleasure and a healthy erotic as fundamental rights. Echoing the sentiments of my fellow Pleasure Ninja, Brittney Cooper: “There is no justice for black women without pleasure.”

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  discovering the sources of the good life within themselves, not in some outer dogma or dictum, or in some material form. In another very important respect, they were preparing themselves for the life of the future. They were developing a “wisdom of the group,” a self-correcting course of action. When a group is following a charismatic leader, a theoretical or theological dogma, or any human formulation, it is, in the long run, going to be misled. The direction pointed toward by any person or any formulation always contains some error. As time goes on, the direction becomes more and more erroneous, eventually becoming destructive of its own goal. But when a group struggles through to a choice, having heard this need and that demand, this proposal and another that contradicts it, gradually all the data become available and the decision reached is a hard-won harmony of all the ideas, needs, and desires of each and every one. Furthermore, since the decision has been their own, they are continuously open to feedback and can correct the direction as new data occur. This probably represents the most error-proof mode of decision- making that we know. CONCLUSION Our experience with the large ciclos contains important lessons in what the education of the future might be. We learned that in a very short space of time, large groups of people could begin to live in ways more appropriate to our uncertain future. They could develop a participatory mode of decisionmaking that is adaptable to almost any situation and contains its own self-correcting gyroscopic mechanism, as error-free as any decision-making process known. They could develop a sense of community in which respect for others, and cooperation rather than competition, were the keynotes. They could develop a new confidence in themselves, discovering the source of values within themselves, coming to an awareness that the good life is within, not dependent on outside sources. We learned that these changes, so appropriate for living in a disintegrating culture, could be initiated in a short space of time and in a very large group of people, if we ourselves were able to be, in a fashion suitable to that changing world. Not one of these learnings is entirely new, but taken together, they indicate that we have the educational strategy for making these human changes possible, and that this approach is feasible here and now. All in all, our experiences give a challenging hint of what an education for the next century might become. REFERENCES HARMAN, W. W. The coming transfiguration. The Futurist, February 1977, 11(1), 4–12; and April 1977, 11(2), 106+. STAVRIANOS, L. S. The promise of the coming Dark Age. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976. THOMPSON, W. I. Auguries of planetization. Quest, July/August 1977, 1(3), p. 55– 60, 94–95. Part IV LOOKING AHEAD: A PERSON- CENTERED SCENARIO

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  You might be thinking of getting married yourself, rather soon?’‘Oh no,’ I said.‘You’ve no young man?’‘Not one.’That seemed to please her. She said, ‘I am glad. You see, it is just myself and my daughter here, and she is rather an unusual, trusting sort of girl. I wouldn’t like to have young fellers, coming in and out ...’‘There’s no young man,’ I said firmly.She smiled again; then seemed to hesitate. ‘Might I ask - might I - why you are leaving your present address?’ At that I hesitated - and her smile grew smaller.‘To be truthful,’ I said, ‘there was a little bit of unpleasantness with my landlady ...’‘Ah.’ She stiffened a little, and I realised that in telling the truth I had blundered.‘What I mean,’ I began - but I could see her mind working. What did she think? That my landlady had caught me kissing her husband, probably.‘You see,’ she began again, regretfully, ‘my daughter ...’This daughter must be a beauty and a half, I thought - or else a complete erotomaniac - if the mother is so eager to keep her safe and close, away from young men’s eyes. And yet, just as I had been drawn to that mispelt card in the shopkeeper’s window, so, now, there was something about the house and its owner that tugged at me, unaccountably.I took a chance.‘Mrs Milne,’ I said, ‘the fact of it is I have a curious occupation - a theatrical occupation, you could call it - that obliges me sometimes to dress in gentlemen’s suits. My landlady caught me at it, and took against me. I know for certain that, if I live here, I shall never bring a chap over your threshold. You may wonder how I know that, but I can only say, I do. I shan’t ever get behind with my rent; I shall keep myself to myself and you won’t hardly know that I am here at all. If you and Miss Milne will only not object to the sight of a girl in a pair of bags and a neck-tie now and again - well, then I think I might be the lodger you are seeking.’I had spoken in earnest - more or less - and now Mrs Milne looked thoughtful. ‘Gentlemen’s suits, you say,’ she said - not unkindly or incredulously, but with a rather interested air. I nodded, then pulled at the cord of my bag and drew out a jacket — it happened to be the top half of the guardsman’s uniform. I gave it a shake and held it up against myself, rather hopefully. ‘My eyes,’ she said, folding her arms, ‘he’s a beauty, in’ he? Now my little girl would like him.’ She gestured to the door. ‘If you’ll permit me ... ?’ She stepped out on to the landing and gave a shout: ‘Gracie!’ I heard the sound of footsteps below.