Pride

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.

Page 132 of 174 · 20 per page

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

  Every year when the weather was cooler, the Kuru-Panchala dispatched warriors to establish a new Aryan outpost a little farther to the east, where they would subjugate the local populations, raid their farms, and seize their cattle. 17 Before they could settle in this region, the dense tropical forests had to be cleared by fire, so Agni became the colonists’ divine alter ego in this incremental drive eastward and the inspiration of the Agnicayana, the ritualized battle that consecrated the new colony. First, the fully armed warriors processed to the riverbank to collect clay to build a brick fire-altar, a provocative assertion of their right to this territory, fighting any locals who stood in their way. The colony became a reality only when Agni leaped forth on the new altar. 18 These blazing altars distinguished Aryan encampments from the darkness of the barbarian villages. The settlers also used Agni to lure away their neighbors’ cattle, which would follow the flames. “He should take brightly burning fire to the settlement of his rival,” says a later text. “He thereby takes his wealth, his property.” 19 Agni symbolized the warrior’s courage and dominance, his most fundamental and divine “self” (atman). 20 Yet like Indra, his other alter ego, the warrior was tainted. It was said that Indra had committed three sins that had fatally weakened him: he had killed a Brahmin priest, broken a pact of friendship with Vritra, and seduced another man’s wife by disguising himself as her husband; he had thus, progressively, forfeited his spiritual majesty (tejas), his physical strength (bala), and his beauty. 21 This mythical disintegration now paralleled a profound change in Aryan society during which Indra and Agni would become inadequate expressions of divinity to some of the rishis. It was the first step in a long process that would undermine the Aryans’ addiction to violence. We do not know exactly how the Aryans established their two kingdoms in the Doab, the “Land of the Arya,” but they can only have done so by force. Events may well have conformed to what social historians call the “conquest theory” of state establishment. 22 Peasants have much to lose from warfare, which destroys their crops and kills their livestock. When the economically poorer but militarily superior Aryans attacked them, it is possible that, rather than suffer this devastation, some of the more pragmatic peasants decided to submit to the raiders and offer them part of their surplus instead. For their part, the raiders learned not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, since they could acquire a steady income by returning to the village to demand more goods.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My brother, let go, stumbled and leaned against the SUV, looking at my tail as if it might strangle his ankle too: It dangled slack between my legs again, sated. Wringing the sweat from its fur, I tucked it back into my underwear. I stepped back from my father’s kneeling body, his shadow truncated at the waist. He moaned a sound too low and gutted for even the car engines to comprehend, his lip metallic where he’d bitten it. He stood up halfway, cradling his skinned-open knee like a geode: Beneath the broken dullness of his skin, he was rubied with blood, pearled with tendon. Looking up at me through the black blades of his hair, he said my name, his mouth unstitched by it. It wasn’t the pain of his knee that kept him from following us: It was my face, my face that was my mother’s, my face that made the sun swivel around and witness it, my face backlit and blurred into the sky’s blue, resembling what couldn’t be touched. I spoke down to him: We’re going home. You will not follow us. His face was stunned flat as a run-over penny. We walked and he watched our backs, my brother’s shirt sheer with his sweat. My skin was soaked like a dress, a wet weight draped over my bones, so heavy I wanted to kneel down on the pavement. At the bus stop, we waited for three hundred breaths until it arrived, exhaust unspooling from its rear end. Night came sudden as a sheet thrown over a cage. My brother turned to me and said we had no money. He was looking at me between the legs instead of at my face, as if my tail would descend now and speak for me. I laughed, giddy with what I knew it could do, thinking suddenly of the monkey that had pissed through the gap in its cage, the way a rainbow had refracted through it. The bus doors opened. The driver was Asian and tired and looked down the steps at us. At my brother’s collar of thumbprints. He let us on for free. _ It was raining when we got home, and our mother was standing outside the house, wet hair like guohua, one strand striping her collarbone, the other rain-pasted to the arc of her cheek, the rest coiled around her neck. My brother and I were wet too, having walked from the nearest bus stop. The piss was rinsed from his legs, replaced by rain. I’ve been waiting, she said.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was the truth, and yet I felt like an impostor - as if I had just said, ‘I am Lord Rosebery’. I did not look at Florence — though out of the corner of my eye I saw her mouth fly open. I looked at the tattooed woman, and gave her a modest little shrug. She, for her part, had stepped back; now she slapped our stall until it shook, and called, laughing, to her friend. ‘Jenny, you have won your coin! The gal says she is Nan King, all right!’ At her words the group at the billiard-table let up a cry, and half the room fell silent. The gay girls in the neighbouring stall got up, to peer over at me; I heard ‘Nan King, it is Nan King there!’ whispered at every table. The tattooed tom’s friend - Jenny - came stepping over, and held her hand out to me. ‘Miss King,’ she said, ‘I knew it was you the moment you come in. What happy times I used to have, watching you and Miss Butler at the Paragon!’ ‘You’re very kind,’ I said, taking her hand. As I did so, I caught Florence’s eye. ‘Nance,’ she asked, ‘what is all this? Did you really work the halls? Why did you never say?’ ‘It was all rather long ago ...’ She shook her head, and looked me over. ‘You don’t mean you didn’t know your friend was such a star?’ asked Jenny now, overhearing. ‘We didn’t know that she was any kind of star,’ said Annie. ‘Her and Kitty Butler - what a team! There never was a pair o’ mashers like ’em...’ ‘Mashers!’ said Florence. ‘Why yes,’ continued Jenny. Then: ‘Why, just a minute - I believe there is the very thing to show it, here...’ She pushed her way through the crowd of gaping women to the bar, and here I saw her catch the barmaid’s eye, then gesture towards the wall behind the rows of upturned bottles. There was a faded piece of baize there, with a hundred old notes and picture-postcards fastened to it; I saw Mrs Swindles reach into the layers of curling paper for a second, then draw out something small and bent. This she handed to Jenny; in a moment it had been placed before me, and I found myself gazing at a photograph: Kitty and I, faint but unmistakable, in Oxford bags and boaters. I had my hand upon her shoulder, and a cigarette, unlit, between the fingers. I looked and looked at the picture.

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

  The Quest of the Holy Grail (c. 1225), a prose fable, takes us into the heart of knightly spirituality.114 It shows clear influences of the Cistercian ideal, which had introduced a more introspective spirituality into monasticism, but it replaced this internal quest with heroism on the battlefield and set the knight’s religious world apart from the ecclesiastical establishment. Indeed, knights alone can participate in the quest for the Grail, the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper. Their liturgy takes place in a feudal castle rather than a church or monastery, and their clergy are not abbots or bishops but hermits, many of them former knights. Galahad, not the pope, is Christ’s representative on earth. The knight’s loyalty to his earthly lord is a sacred duty and no other commitment can supersede it: “For the heart of the knight must be so hard and unrelenting to his sovereign’s foe that nothing in the world can soften it. And if he gives way to fear, he is not of the company of knights, a veritable companion, who would sooner meet death in battle than fail to uphold the quarrel of their lord.”115 Killing the enemies of his king, even if they are Christians, is just as holy as killing the Muslim enemies of Christ. The ecclesiastical establishment found it impossible to control the knights’ dissident Christianity. Aware that they were in an unassailable position, these knights simply refused to comply with the Church’s demands.116 “Everybody should honor [them],” wrote an early thirteenth-century cleric, “… for they defend Holy Church, and they uphold justice for us against those who would do us harm.… Our chalices would be stolen from before us at the table of God and nothing would ever stop it.… The good would never be able to endure if the wicked did not fear knights.”117 Why should knights obey the Church? Their victories alone proved that they had a special relationship with the Lord of Hosts.118 Indeed, one poet argued, the physical effort, skill, tenacity, and courage that warfare required made it “a much nobler work” than any other occupation and put the knight in a superior class of his own. Chivalry, claimed another knight, was “such a difficult, tough and very costly thing to learn that no coward ventures to take it on.”119 Knights regarded fighting as an ascetic practice that was far more challenging than a monk’s fasts or vigils. A knight knew what real suffering was: every day he took up his cross and followed Jesus onto the battlefield.120

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

  Aryan religion, therefore, gave supreme sanction to what was essentially organized violence and theft. Every time they set out on a raid, warriors drank a ritual draft of the intoxicating liquor pressed from soma, a sacred plant that filled them with frenzied rapture, just as Trito did before pursuing Serpent; they thus felt at one with their hero. The Trito myth implied that all cattle, the measure of wealth in pastoral society, belonged to the Aryans and that other peoples had no right to these resources. The Trito story has been called “the imperialist’s myth par excellence” because it provided sacred justification for the Indo-European military campaigns in Europe and Asia.61 The figure of Serpent presented those native peoples who dared to resist the Aryan onslaught as inhuman, misshapen monsters. But cattle and wealth were not the only prizes worth fighting for: like Gilgamesh, Aryans would always also seek honor, glory, prestige, and posthumous fame in battle.62 People rarely go to war for one reason only; rather, they are driven by interlocking motivations—material, social, and ideological. In Homer’s Iliad, when the Trojan warrior Sarpedon urges his friend Glaukos to make a highly dangerous assault on the Greek camp, he quite unselfconsciously lists all the material perks of a heroic reputation—special seating, the best cuts of meat, booty, and “a great piece of land”—as an integral part of a warrior’s nobility.63 It is significant that the English words value and valor both have a common Indo-European root, as do virtue and virility. But while Aryan religion glorified warfare, it also acknowledged that this violence was problematic. Any military campaign involves activities that would be abhorrent and unethical in civilian life.64 In Aryan mythology, therefore, the war god is often called a “sinner” because a soldier is forced to act in a way that calls his integrity into question. The warrior always carries a taint.65 Even Achilles, one of the greatest Aryan warriors, does not escape this stain. Here is Homer’s description of the aristeia (“triumphal rampage”) in which Achilles frenziedly slaughters one Trojan soldier after another: As inhuman fire sweeps on in fury through the deep angles Of drywood mountain and sets ablaze the depth of the timber And the blustering wind lashes the flame along, so Achilleus Swept everywhere with his spear, like something more than a mortal.66 Achilles has become an inhuman force of purely destructive power. Homer compares him to a thresher crushing barley on the threshing floor, but instead of producing nourishing food, he is “trampling alike dead men and shields” as if the two were indistinguishable, his “invincible hands … spattered with bloody filth.”67 Warriors would never attain the first rank in Indo-European society.68 They always had to struggle “to be the best” (Greek: aristos); yet they were still relegated below the priests to the second class. Herdsmen could not survive without raiding; their violence was essential to the pastoralist economy, but the hero’s aggression often repelled the very people who revered him.69

• From My People (2022)

  Upon graduation, I left for New York, where the late, great editor of the New Yorker magazine, William Shawn, had read about my case and my dream and invited me to join the staff, along with other young graduates from prestigious northern universities. Initially, like them, my job was typing rejection slips and story lineups, but before long I was promoted to reporter, the first black to be named to that position. I kept my eye on and my soul in what was going on in the civil rights movement, and wrote about black people in ways they were rarely portrayed anywhere in the media—in their full humanity. I continued this work at the New York Times , and in the decades since, never strayed, even as my reach widened to television, radio, and other media, and to the world beyond our borders—most notably South Africa during the days of apartheid. I always felt I had a responsibility to confront issues of race and racism, but in ways that narrow the divide and focus on the positives of difference, rather than the all-too-exploited negatives. It hasn’t been without its challenges. Once, when I was working at PBS NewsHour , I surprised a white guest when he saw me sit down on the set to interview him. “How long have you been doing this?” he asked after the show was over. And when I answered, “About thirty years,” he responded, “Well, I guess it beats being a hairdresser.” I view unintentionally hurtful comments like that as coming from people who, if not ignorant, are uninformed. Unfortunately, expressions of racial insensitivity or hatred are still littering the landscape of our ever-elusive “more perfect union.” And the reversal of some of the progress we made—sadly evident in the resegregation of our nation’s schools and neighborhoods—is spurring scant public outrage, not even another righteous crusade. And so, wearing my invisible tiara, I continue to renew the commitment and the mantra of the civil rights movement: to “keep on keeping on,” to use the values the village in stilled in me all those years ago, to recite and write about our history and its relevance to our struggles today, to work at ensuring people are judged not by the color of their skin or the god they worship or the person they love, but by the content of their character—Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of “the Beloved Community.” Oak Bluffs, More than a Region in My MindThe Vineyard Gazette JULY 5, 2012 Throughout my high school years in Atlanta, Georgia, in the 1950s, Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard was a region in my mind. I can still remember the image I had of the island back then—an enchanted place with beautiful green grapevines gracefully covering a landscape with children roaming freely in and around them. One of those children was my classmate, Bobby Jackson, whose father was a prominent doctor in the city. Every summer Dr.

• From My People (2022)

  Can you imagine a black man winning the Decathlon in 1936? Yes, Jesse Owens was in the Olympics but only in one area; I could do many things. When I got older, I realized I could have had immortality.” Instead, Strode saw Glenn Morris go to the Olympics in Berlin and believes that he was encouraged to enter UCLA to keep him from competing. So Woody Strode, son of a Los Angeles stonemason, who “never had it too rough” and who “ate a lot of beef,” went to college. “I got a cultural education—majored in history and education,” he says with a slightly mocking tone. “Never used it, but I could walk into the White House with it now.” The physical skills that Strode developed during his years as an athlete have enabled him to be his own stunt man in all of his movies. When he made the western Shalako in Spain in 1968 with Brigitte Bardot and Sean Connery, he was behind the scenes shooting all the fire arrows for the Indians who were supposed to be shooting them at him . (“I always take my bows with me. I have several seventy- and eighty-pound bows. I was a little embarrassed to bring them to New York.”) Strode’s career as a professional athlete ended when he suffered the effects of the no-blocking rule in Canadian football—two broken ribs over the heart and a shoulder that had to be completely reconstructed. “It was like I had fought Joe Louis,” he recalls. In 1950, Strode was approached to play in a Tarzan movie. He balked when the producers asked him to shave his head—he felt it was too dehumanizing—but when they told him they’d pay him $500 a week, “I said, ‘All right, where are the pluckers?’” Then, Strode found, “I was out in the world market with a bald head. Trapped for life. Finally, it became a way of life.” Other movies followed. Despite the preponderance of cowboy-and-Indian sagas, they have included Spartacus , The Ten Commandments , The Sins of Rachel Cade , and Che . But among them all, “I’ve never gotten over Sergeant Rutledge ,” Strode says. “That was a classic. It had dignity. John Ford put classic words in my mouth.” Set in the Southwest in the post–Civil War years, the film cast Strode as a cavalryman on trial for a double murder and the rape of a white girl. Innocent of the charge and fearful of the prejudice surrounding his trial, Rutledge runs away from his all-black cavalry unit. “But the Indians were about to trap my men, and for me, it was either freedom for myself or save them from the trap. You never seen a Negro come off a mountain like John Wayne before,” Strode says, standing to demonstrate how he rode down the side of a mountain with a nine-pound gun hoisted in the air.

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

  When she woke, she knew that she would not be fighting wild beasts that day but “the Fiend” himself and that “the victory would be mine.” 139 Martyrdom would always be the protest of a minority, yet the violent deaths of the martyrs became a graphic demonstration of the structural violence and cruelty of the state. Martyrdom was and would always be a political as well as a religious choice. Targeted as enemies of the empire and in a relationship of starkly asymmetrical power with the authorities, these Christians’ deaths were a defiant assertion of a different allegiance. They had already achieved an eminence that was intrinsically superior to Rome’s, and by laying their deaths at the door of the oppressors, the martyrs effectively demonized them. But these Christians were beginning to develop a history of grievance that gave their faith a newly aggressive edge. They were convinced that, like Jesus in the book of Revelation, they were engaged in an ongoing eschatological battle; when they fought, like gladiators, with wild beasts in the stadium, they were battling with demonic powers (embodied in the imperial authorities) that would expedite Jesus’s triumphant return. 140 Those who voluntarily presented themselves to the authorities were committing what would later be called “revolutionary suicide.” By forcing the authorities to put them to death, they laid bare for all to see the intrinsic violence of the so-called Pax Romana, and their suffering, they firmly believed, would hasten its end. Other Christians, however, did not regard the empire as satanic; rather, they experienced a remarkable conversion to Rome. 141 Again, this shows that it is impossible to point to an “essential” Christianity that promoted identical courses of action. Origen, for instance, believed that Christianity was the culmination of the classical culture of antiquity; like the Hebrew Scriptures, Greek philosophy had also been an expression of the Logos, the Word of God. The Pax Romana had been providentially ordained. “It would have hindered Jesus’ teaching from being spread through the whole world,” Origen believed, “if there had been many kingdoms.” 142 The statesmanship and wise decision making of the bishops of the Mediterranean cities gained them a reputation for being the “friends of God.” 143 Cyprian, bishop of Carthage (200–258), claimed that he presided over a privileged society that was invested with a majesty every bit as powerful as Rome. 144 In 306 Valerius Aurelius Constantinus, who had distinguished himself as a soldier under Diocletian, succeeded his father Constantius Chlorus as one of the two rulers of the empire’s western provinces.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I soon made friends with Curtis; got into the habit of dining with him and when he found that my handwriting was very good, he gave me the day-book to keep and in a couple of months had taught me bookkeeping while entrusting me with a good deal of it. He was not lazy; but most men of forty like to have a capable assistant. By Christmas that year I was keeping all the books except the ledger and I knew, as I thought, the whole business of the hotel. The dining-room, it seemed to me was very badly managed; but as luck would have it, I was first to get control of the office. As soon as Curtis found out that I could safely be trusted to do his work, he began going out at dinner time and often stayed away the whole day. About New Year he was away for five days and confided in me when he returned, that he had been on a “bust.” He wasn’t happy with his wife, it appeared, and he used to drink to drown her temper. In February he was away for ten days; but as he had given me the key of the safe I kept everything going. One day Kendrick found me in the office working and wanted to know about Curtis: “how long had he been away!” “A day or two,” I replied. Kendrick looked at me and asked for the ledger: “it’s written right up!” he exclaimed, “did you do it?” I had to say I did; but at once I sent a bellboy for Curtis. The boy didn’t find him at his house and next day I was brought up before Mr. Cotton. I couldn’t deny that I had kept the books and Cotton soon saw that I was shielding Curtis out of loyalty. When Curtis came in next day, he gave the whole show away; he was half-drunk still and rude to boot. He had been unwell, he said; but his work was in order. He was ‘fired’ there and then by Mr. Cotton and that evening Kendrick asked me to keep things going properly till he could persuade his uncle that I was trustworthy and older than I looked. In a couple of days I saw Mr. Cotton and Mr. Kendrick together. “Can you keep the books and be night-clerk and take care of the billiard-room?” Mr. Cotton asked me sharply. “I think so” I replied, “I’ll do my best.” “Hm!” he grunted: “what pay do you think you ought to have?” “I’ll leave that to you sir,” I said, “I shall be satisfied whatever you give me.” “The devil you will,” he said grumpily, “suppose I said, keep on at your present rate?” I smiled; “O.K. Sir.”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The same toleration continued under Gratian, son and successor of Valentinian (375–383). After a time, however; under the influence of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, this emperor went a step further. He laid aside the title and dignity of Pontifex Maximus, confiscated the temple property, abolished most of the privileges of the priests and vestal virgins, and withdrew, at least in part, the appropriation from the public treasury for their support.92 By this step heathenism became, like Christianity before Constantine and now in the American republic, dependent on the voluntary system, while, unlike Christianity, it had no spirit of self-sacrifice, no energy of self-preservation. The withdrawal of the public support cut its lifestring, and left it still to exist for a time by vis inertiae alone. Gratian also, in spite of the protest of the heathen party, removed in 382 the statue and the altar of Victoria, the goddess of victory, in the senate building at Rome, where once the senators used to take their oath, scatter incense, and offer sacrifice; though he was obliged still to tolerate there the elsewhere forbidden sacrifices and the public support of some heathen festivities. Inspired by Ambrose with great zeal for the Catholic faith, he refused freedom to heretics, and prohibited the public assemblies of the Eunomians, Photinians, and Manichaeans.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  1 If you can, I suggest that you have an orgasm before diving into this book and at the beginning of each new section. I am not joking—an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away and the worries at bay.2 “Nibblings” is a gender-neutral word for referring to the children of your sibling, introduced to me by Tanuja Jagernauth.3 People also ask me for directions a lot, even when I am in a new place and feel lost.4 You might be thinking that movies aren’t real life. I am thinking that the line between the real and the imagined is a construct.5 See the essays “Love as Political Resistance” (p. 59) and “On Nonmonogamy” (p. 409) in this book for more on relationship anarchy.6 I recommend putting them in a fruity smoothie or dark chocolate.7 See the essay “Ecstasy Saved My Life” in this book (p. 263).8 I feel your doubt. It was three sets of paired bite marks on my left arm and two sets on the right. The hospital didn’t believe me and said it was from dangerous urban composting. Like vampires don’t like leaves.9 Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, eds., Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015).10 adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017).11 Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 264–74.12 Richard Strozzi-Heckler, The Leadership Dojo: Build Your Foundation as an Exemplary Leader (Berkeley, CA: Frog Books, 2007), 59.13 I owe this one to my incomparable, brave, and brilliant Canadian woe, Jodie. Folks who are rooted in sensing and seeking pleasure, and bring that energy into their work and relationships, are shining a light for others—there is another path that isn’t full of stress, self-doubt, pain, victimization, and suffering. There is a path in which everything is learning, playing, practicing, doing things anew.14 This is true in sex; it’s true in work; it’s just true.15 But as Maya Angelou once told Oprah, even moderation needs moderation.16 My first memory of this concept, of being satisfiable, was from Staci Haines.17 “What is Somatics?,” Generative Somatics, accessed July 23, 2018, http://www.generativesomatics.org/content/what-somatics.section one: Who Taught You to Feel Good?May you devour life. —the late Kevin Estrada, as a blessing to the children of Elizabeth Mendez Berry Lineage, an Overview

• From My People (2022)

  Chisholm reaches a lot of people,” she said, “because she is in demand as a speaker, and I think Basil will get tremendous support, perhaps even more than if I were traveling with him because of the audiences I reach.” She has endorsed Howard J. Samuels in preference to Arthur J. Goldberg in the Democratic primary for governor even though Mr. Goldberg is running on the same ticket with Mr. Paterson. But the argument that her support for Mr. Samuels suggests a lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Paterson, who is black, “is a lot of baloney,” she said. “This is a smokescreen people are using to becloud the whole gubernatorial election in New York,” she said. “The point has to be made that this year, because of new legislation, voters of this state do not have to vote for a slate in the primary, but can vote for individuals. That is why Howard Samuels can win and why Basil can win, too. “I’m not fighting Arthur Goldberg per se. He’s a fine jurist, a distinguished American, but he allowed himself to be used by the bosses, and Basil almost didn’t get on his ticket, as a result. “They kept saying to me, ‘Three Jews and a black man. That just won’t go over upstate.’ I told them, ‘OK,’ if that’s your problem, take one of the Jews off.” Mrs. Chisholm’s outspoken style has been evident since she arrived in Washington. Right off she asked that her committee assignment be changed from agriculture to something more relevant to her mostly black, mostly urban constituency. Since then she has taken sides on a variety of controversial causes: women’s rights, abortion reform, ending the war in Vietnam, and enfranchising eighteen-year-olds, all of which she favors. Such high visibility has led to a few ticklish situations. Because there are so few blacks in Congress, black people from all over the country deluge her with more calls than she and her small staff can possibly handle, she said. A delicate problem arose last week when she refused to appear at a “Shirley Chisholm Day,” held at her own church in Brooklyn, the Janes United Methodist Church. One reason, she said, was that church officials had used her name to solicit funds from other House members. “It was all very embarrassing,” she remarked. Within the time span that includes student demonstrations at New Haven and the deaths at Kent State University and Jackson State College, the number of students visiting her Washington office in the Longworth Building has doubled. “She can’t say no,” said Mrs. Carolyn Smith, her administrative assistant. At thirty-one, Mrs. Smith is the oldest member of Mrs. Chisholm’s Washington staff, which is largely female and also includes college “interns” (most of them white) who get credit from their schools for their work. A small, all-white contingent from Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, originally scheduled for a fifteen-minute meeting, ended up by spending an hour as they listened to a few of Mrs.

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

  All this meant that the new Ram temple had become a symbol of a liberated India. The emotions involved were memorably expressed in a speech by the revered renouncer Rithambra at Hyderabad in April 1991, which she delivered in the mesmerizing rhymed couplets of Indian epic poetry. The temple would not be a mere building; nor was Ayodhya important simply because it was Ram’s birthplace: “The Ram temple is our honor. It is our self-esteem. It is the image of Hindu unity … We shall build the temple!” Ram was “the representation of mass-consciousness”; he was the god of the lowest castes—the fishermen, cobblers, and washermen.69 Hindus were in mourning for the dignity, self-esteem, and Hindutva, the Hindu identity, that they had lost. But this new Hindu identity could be reconstructed only by the destruction of the antithetical “other.” The Muslim was the obverse of the tolerant, benign Hindu: fanatically intolerant, a destroyer of shrines, and an arch-tyrant. Throughout, Rithambra laced her speech with vivid images of mutilated corpses, amputated arms, chests cut open like those of dissected frogs, and bodies slashed, burned, raped, and violated, all evoking Mother India, desecrated and ravaged by Islam. The 800 million Hindus of India can hardly claim to be economically or socially oppressed, so Hindu nationalists feed on such images of persecution and insist that a strong Hindu identity can be restored only by decisive, violent action. [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] Until the 1980s, the Palestinians had held aloof from the religious revival in the rest of the Middle East. Yasser Arafat’s PLO was a secular nationalist organization. Most Palestinians admired him, but the PLO’s secularism appealed mainly to the Westernized Palestinian elite, and observant Muslims played virtually no part in its terrorist actions.70 When the PLO was supressed in the Gaza Strip in 1971, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin founded Mujama (“Congress”), an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which focused on social welfare work. By 1987 Mujama had established clinics, drug rehabilitation centers, youth clubs, sporting facilities, and Quran classes throughout Gaza, supported not only by Muslim alms (zakat) but also by the Israeli government in an attempt to undermine the PLO. At this point Yassin had no interest in armed struggle. When the PLO accused him of being Israel’s puppet, he replied that, on the contrary, it was their secular ethos that was destroying Palestinian identity. Mujama was far more popular than Islamic Jihad (IJ), formed during the 1980s, which attempted to apply Qutb’s ideas to the Palestinian tragedy and regarded itself as the vanguard of a larger global struggle “against the forces of arrogance [jahiliyyah], the colonial enemy, all over the world.”71 IJ engaged in terrorist attacks against the Israeli military but rarely quoted the Quran; its rhetoric was frankly secular. Ironically, the only thing that was religious about this organization was its name—and this may explain its lack of mass support.72

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

  Not even the gods are able to prevent it, for he becomes their very self (atman).” 63 It was a defiant declaration of independence, a political as well as a spiritual revolution. The Kshatriya could now cast aside his dependence on the priest who dominated the ritual arena. At the same time as vaishyas and shudras were climbing the social ladder, the warrior aristocracy was making a bid for the first place in society. Yet the Upanishads also challenged the Kshatriya martial ethos. The atman had originally been Agni, the deepest, divine “self” of the warrior that he had attained by fighting and stealing. The heroic Aryan drive eastward had been motivated by desire for earthly things— cows, plunder, land, honor, and prestige. Now the Upanishad sages urged their disciples to renounce such desire. Anyone who remained fixated on mundane wealth could never be liberated from the cycle of suffering and rebirth, but “a man who does not desire—who is without desires, who is freed from desires, whose only desire is his self (atman)—his vital functions do not depart. Brahman he is and to brahman he goes.” 64 New meditative techniques induced a state of mind that was “calm, composed, cool, patient and collected”: in short, the very opposite of the old agitated Aryan mentality. 65 One of the Upanishads actually described Indra, no less, living peacefully as a humble student in the forest with his teacher and relinquishing violence in order to find perfect tranquillity. 66 Aryans had always considered themselves inherently superior to others; their rituals had bred within them a deep sense of entitlement that had fueled their raids and conquests. But the Upanishads taught that because the atman, the essence of every single creature, was identical with the Brahman, all beings shared the same sacred core. The Brahman was the subtle kernel of the banyan seed from which a great tree grows. 67 It was the sap that gave life to every part of the tree; it was also the most fundamental reality of every single human being. 68 Brahman was like a chunk of salt left overnight to dissolve in a beaker of water; even though it could not be seen the next morning, it was still present in every sip. 69 Instead of repudiating this basic kinship with all beings, as the warrior did when he demonized his enemy, these sages were deliberately cultivating an awareness of it. Everyone liked to imagine that he was unique, but in reality his special distinguishing features were no more permanent than rivers that all flowed into the same sea. Once they left the riverbed, they became “just the ocean,” no longer proclaiming their individuality, crying “I am that river,” “I am this river.”

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  In return, it was actually the opposite, my friends specifically were so inspired and happy for me. They wanted to know how I found this new sense of self. They too wanted to swing on the pole and twerk on their knees. Soon I found out that I wasn’t only doing this for myself, I was doing it for every single womyn who was ever told they were fat or ugly or not sexy or unable. I was like, c’mon sisters, we doing this! We outcheea! amb. What do you say to people who think they cannot pole dance (asking for a friend)? Suguey. In my most passionate and affirming voice: “Pole dance is for everyone, especially you! And if you don’t believe me, just give me an hour, your most positive attitude, and we got this, friend!” Honestly, though, you may not be up in the middle of the air going upside down right away—shoot, even I can’t do that sometimes. But with consistency, hard work, and trust, you can twerk on the pole and do your best body roll, and with time, you will be dancing away! You will get strong AF,110 and with every class you will find a renewed sense of self, confidence, [and] increased strength, and every time you look into the mirror, you’ll be, like, “Hey, boo!” amb. I am encouraged. For my friend. So how does pole dancing connect with social justice? Suguey. During a time of intense surveillance, when our bodies are policed along the border and in our communities—and while living under a regime that reads Latinx bodies as criminal, illegal, deportable, and as disposable labor, a society that renders women/femmes of color as the primary receptors of physical and emotional violence … in this time, expressing embodied joy, practicing revolutionary love, self-care, and having mindfulness of our well-being and health are the most radical acts we can perform. This is also a time when queer bodies are under intense policing and subject to violence—sometimes the only option for true freedom that queer Latinx have is creative expression. I find my freedom in an embodied praxis of self-love through dance. Pole gives me the pleasure and possibility to just be in a society hell-bent on hating me for being brown, femme/female, Mexican, and queer. Taking care of my spirit and heart and body in this way allows me to continue doing the work that matters—whether it’s organizing in the streets with our communities or advocating for our enfranchisement through formal means. Pole allows me to shout, “I’m here, I’m free, my body defies your boundaries and boxes, and I can and will be happy!” 110 AF is a shortcut way the youth say “as fuck.”Pleasure Over SixtyA Conversation with Idelisse Malave and Alta Starr

• From My People (2022)

  “I had the greatest Glory Hallelujah ride across the Pecos River that any black man ever had on the screen. And I did it myself. I carried the whole black race across that river.” Strode is excited now; his eyes and the quick movements of his body start to reveal his other self. He is still standing but he leans into a crouch and quotes his dialogue from the movie as if it were still real: “The Ninth Cavalry is my home, my self-respect, and my real freedom, and the way I was deserting it, I weren’t nothing but a swamp-running nigger. And I ain’t that. I am a man!” Strode snaps his fingers, slaps his hand on his knee, and his gentle eyes tell you all. “John Ford wanted to know if we could get away with saying ‘nigger’ on the screen, and I said why not? It would be the first time a black man ever called himself a nigger on the screen. And I wanted to hit home.” But it was not at home that Strode found the greatest appreciation. He talks often about “the Italians” and it was, in fact, the Italians who, impressed with his work in Spain in Shalako , offered him sixty thousand dollars to come to Rome. The movies were to be westerns Italian style but by that time Strode had developed what black folks call “an attitude.” Although his agent was concerned about bad scripts, “Me. I didn’t care. If the money was right, I’d play Mickey Mouse.” During the years in Hollywood, why hadn’t he protested the lack of billing, the one-dimensional characters he was given to play? “In those years, where could I go? I didn’t give a damn. They paid me my money. Why should I have a publicity agent? What was I gonna say?” Yet, despite his working in Italy, Strode and his wife, a Hawaiian princess, Luukialuana Kalaeloa, whom he met in Hilo, Hawaii, in 1938 when he went there to play football, continued to keep California as home base. Their son, Woody Jr., now a candidate for a master’s degree in Asian studies at the University of Hawaii, and their daughter, June, an actress in TV commercials, flew back and forth to Italy to be with their parents. Earlier this year Strode came home to see his son and, while here, was offered The Last Rebel , a western in which he acts with Joe Namath. But although the film is opening shortly, Strode is not doing any stumping for it, as he is for Black Jesus . He won’t discuss his reasons but those around him hint that it’s the billing thing again, with Namath on the top. Strode simply says, “Namath’ll carry the picture because he’s a star and the kids love him. I do enough to protect myself.” One thing that nettled him was the way The Last Rebel was promoted in Birmingham, Alabama. “They served slices of watermelon,” he said wryly.

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

  Paul’s Cathedral, argued that: “In the Law of Nature and Nations, a Land never inhabited by any or utterly derelicted and immemorially abandoned by the former Inhabitants, becomes theirs that will possess it.” 122 The colonists would take this belief with them to North America—but unlike these early modern thinkers, they had absolutely no intention of separating church and state. 10 The Triumph of the Secular When the Pilgrim Fathers arrived in Massachusetts Bay in 1630, they would have been horrified to hear that they were about to lay the foundations of the world’s first secular republic. They had left England because Archbishop Laud, they believed, had corrupted their church with popish practices; they regarded their migration as a new Exodus and America, the “English Canaan,” as their “land of Promise.” 1 Before landing, John Winthrop, first governor of the Bay Colony, reminded them that they had come to the American wilderness to build a truly Protestant community that would be a light to other nations and inspire Old England to revive the Reformation: 2 “We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world.” 3 One of their most important missions was to save the Native Americans from the wiles of the French Catholic settlers in North America, making New England a “bulwark against the kingdom of Antichrist, which the Jesuits labour to rear up in these parts.” 4 Winthrop would have found the notion of a secular state inconceivable, and like most of the colonists, he had no time for democracy. Before they set foot on American soil, he reminded the migrants firmly that God had “so disposed the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection.” 5 The Puritans were convinced that God had given the land to them by a special dispensation, but this covenantal faith blended seamlessly with the humanists’ more secular doctrine of natural human rights. On the eve of their departure from Southampton in 1630, their minister, John Cotton, had listed all the biblical precedents for their migration. After showing that God had given the children of Adam and Noah, who had both colonized an “empty” world, the “liberty” to inhabit a “vacant place” without either buying it from the original inhabitants or asking their leave, he segued quite naturally into the argument: “It is a principle in nature, that in a vacant soil he that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his right it is.”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He is the greatest orator of the Greek church, with the exception perhaps of Chrysostom; but his oratory often degenerates into arts of persuasion, and is full of labored ornamentation and rhetorical extravagances, which are in the spirit of his age, but in violation of healthful, natural taste. As a poet he holds a subordinate, though respectable place. He wrote poetry only in his later life, and wrote it not from native impulse, as the bird sings among the branches, but in the strain of moral reflection, upon his own life, or upon doctrinal and moral themes. Many of his orations are poetical, many of his poems are prosaic. Not one of his odes or hymns passed into use in the church. Yet some of his smaller pieces, apothegms, epigrams, and epitaphs, are very beautiful, and betray noble affections, deep feeling, and a high order of talent and cultivation.1983 We have, finally, two hundred and forty-two (or 244) Epistles from Gregory, which are important to the history of the time, and in some cases very graceful and interesting. § 167. Didymus of Alexandria. I. Didymi Alexandrini Opera omnia: accedunt S. Amphilochii et Nectarii scripta quae supersunt Graece, accurante et denuo recognoscente J. P. Migne. Petit-Montrouge (Paris), 1858. (Tom. xxxix. of the Patrologia Graeca.) II. Hieronymus: De viris illustr. c. 109, and Prooem. in Hoseam. Scattered accounts in Rufinus, Palladius, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret. Tillemont: Mémoires, x. 164. Fabricius: Bibl. Gr. tom. ix. 269 sqq. ed. Harless (also in Migne’s ed. of the Opera, pp. 131–140). Schröckh: Church History, vii. 74–87. Guericke: De schola Alexandrina. Hal. 1824. Didymus, the last great teacher of the Alexandrian catechetical school, and a faithful follower of Origen, was born probably at Alexandria about the year 309. Though he became in his fourth year entirely blind, and for this reason has been surnamed Caecus, yet by extraordinary industry he gained comprehensive and thorough knowledge in philosophy, rhetoric, and mathematics. He learned to write by means of wooden tablets in which the characters were engraved; and he became so familiar with the Holy Scriptures by listening to the church lessons, that he knew them almost all by heart. Athanasius nominated him teacher in the theological school, where he zealously labored for nearly sixty years. Even men like Jerome, Rufinus, Palladius, and Isidore, sat at his feet with admiration. He was moreover an enthusiastic advocate of ascetic life, and stood in high esteem with the Egyptian anchorites; with St. Anthony in particular, who congratulated him, that, though blind to the perishable world of sense, he was endowed with the eye of an angel to behold the mysteries of God. He died at a great age, in universal favor, in 395.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Everyone from evangelicals to feminists clutch their pearls about how “it’s so sad to commodify something as intimate and sacred as sexual pleasure!” Never mind that people get paid for intimate labor all the time taking care of children, our emotions, our bodies. People sell their sperm, ovum, and breastmilk, folks. Where’s their rescue squad? Blaming the sex industry for commercializing sex misses the point. The problem isn’t sex work: the problem is that there is no escape for women and femmes from the expectation that we will perform sexual labor for men on demand. The problem is that we have so little control over the ways we are expected to provide sexual pleasure for free. The Pleasures of Getting Paid Is it really so awful to get money for sexual labor? Our legal system has tried to make the sex industry as dangerous as it can be (though still designed to serve cisgender men, naturally). As a result, the sex industry can be really rough for some, yet it still manages to be the best economic option for many. Sex work can offer poor and working-class women and femmes more financial and personal independence, better working conditions, including more control over how they are sexualized, more flexibility, and more pay in a single day than they might earn during a week in other jobs like in the garment trade. This fact about sex work is treated like a side note compared to all the dumb questions about “why’d you get into this?” So let me repeat: sex workers can earn more pay in a single fucking day than in a week in other industries. That matters, and it matters a lot to people who are confined to shitty, low-paid work. Pluma Sumaq writes, “For many women of color in my position, prostitution is not what you do when you hit rock bottom. Prostitution is what you do to stay afloat, to swim rather than sink, to defy rather than disappear. For me, this was ‘financial strategy’ and not ‘easy money.’”49 When poor, working-class, and racialized women and femmes get paid well for sexual labor, it is a victory. We all win: every woman or femme who’s been ordered to smile, to be sexy, to make him feel good, to give him an orgasm—in exchange for what? Being a “good woman”? Being picked by a man? The pleasure of sex work is in the power to take control over our work, our bodies, and what the world tells us we are worth.

• From My People (2022)

  By studying bibliographies, and having somewhat of a reputation as a collector of books—particularly first editions—Mr. Holte has acquired such rare books as the first book reportedly written by a black man in English—The Life of Gustavus Vassa , published in 1789; the first known description of Africa by Leo Africanus, a Moor, translated from Arabic in 1600; and one of the first histories of blacks written by a black, James W. C. Pennington, published in 1841. Mr. Holte’s latest venture, published last week, is a baby book for black families to record their children’s milestones in—the “Cadillac of baby books,” he calls it. Published by Nubian Press, a family-owned company he established for the venture, it features pictures of black babies and their families, along with African proverbs and poetry by blacks. Mr. Holte sees it “providing a guideline for parents of black children during the crucial preschool ages when their images are being formed.” He also sees it preventing the kind of embarrassment he suffered as a college freshman who knew nothing about his people. Meanwhile, he is still learning. He says in a lifetime a man is expected to read around 1,500 books. “I have seven thousand, which means that I look forward to living several lives.” An Entrepreneur’s Trucks Bring Southern Soul Food to HarlemThe New York Times DECEMBER 20, 1971 It’s a sure sign that winter has come when Grady C. Houston’s big trucks make the one-thousand-mile run from Macon, Georgia, to Harlem with the kind of Southern soul food that’s hard to come by in the North. When a chill creeps into the air in the South it means that hog-killing time is close. And that’s when the rear ends of trucks are transformed into artful displays of down-home soul food that reach out and titillate the palate of every Southern-born soul who passes by. Parked at various spots in Harlem, mainly on Saturdays, the trucks attract dozens of shoppers all day who come to pick from the baskets of yams, sweet potatoes, collard and turnip greens, pecans, homemade hot green peppers, liver sausage, hog’s head cheese and chow-chow—hot and mild—cane patch syrup, sage, sausage links, smoked hams and cracklin’, the residues of fat used for cracklin’ bread. Grady Houston, who started the whole thing in 1948 when his father died, has three trucks and his nephews, cousins, and brothers have six more. “My oldest brother was a Pullman porter based in New York,” Mr. Houston explained to a visitor in the Georgia Farm Produce Market, a little store that he owns at 2643 Eighth Avenue, near 141st Street. “When he came home to Georgia for the funeral, I was hauling watermelons to Atlanta, selling them for twenty cents apiece. He told me if I brought ’em to New York, I could get two dollars apiece for them. So, after the funeral, I brought a load. “That was on the twenty-fifth of June,” he continued.