Notable Black Quotes

Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm: What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears. An inordinate proportion of the Marxists I have known would probably have formulated their own views in much the same way. It was almost a point of honor not to engage in 'thinking with the blood,' to borrow a notable phrase from D.H. Lawrence, and to immerse Jewishness in other and wider struggles. Indeed, the old canard about 'rootless cosmopolitanism' finds a perverse sort of endorsement in Jewish internationalism: the more emphatically somebody stresses that sort of rhetoric about the suffering of others, the more likely I would be to assume that the speaker was a Jew. Does this mean that I think there are Jewish 'characteristics'? Yes, I think it must mean that.

An attraction to self-discovery and self-expression can be uplifting and assist us combat epic boredom. The toll of writing truthfully as possible can cause the writer to spiral emotionally out of control. Writing’s tempest temperament can prove a fatal attraction and many notable writers succumbed to the dark knight’s powerful sword. Too many writers and a cast of dead poets found themselves dangerously adrift on the flowing river of black ink interlocked in a life and death struggle with the creative streams of impulsion colliding with the rocky pods of madness. All artists must fight off the impulse to surrender to the aftershock of madness. The mad vein of stabbing pain that we might think belongs exclusively to ourselves is in actuality the capstone of the blood sport known as communal anxiety.

Of the myriad impressive notables related to Dio's passing, perhaps foremost is the fact the man was 67 years old and was still making quality hard rock records, still touring with a new (old) version of Black Sabbath, still singing his absolute heart out about dragons and rainbows, making the infamous devil horns hand gesture he swiped from his Italian grandmother and which has since became the universal, undeniable, completely badass symbol for true metal across all galaxies everywhere, and for which Dio deserves to be ensconced in the heavens forevermore.

Vanessa was deprived of her hormones in prison and thus retained several male characteristics that would have been less evident otherwise, most notably her voice. While she spoke in a high, little-girl voice most of the time, she could switch at will to a booming, masculine Richard-voice. She loved to sneak up behind people and scare the crap out of them this way, and she was very effective at quieting a noisy dining hall, roaring, "Y'all hush up!" Best of all were her Richardian encouragements on the softball field, where she was a sought-after teammate. That bitch could hit.

Much of [John Hanning] Speke's Journal of the Discovery of the Source of Nile is devoted to descriptions of the physical and moral ugliness of Africa's "primitive races," in whose condition he found "a strikingly existing proof of the Holy Scriptures." For his text, Speke took the story in Genesis 9, which tells how Noah, when he was just six hundred years old and had safely skippered his ark over the flood to dry land, got drunk and passed out naked in his tent. On emerging from his oblivion, Noah learned that his youngest son, Ham, had seen him naked; that Ham had told his brothers, Shem and Japheth, of the spectacle; and that Shem and Japheth had, with their backs chastely turned, covered the old man with a garment. Noah responded by cursing the progeny of Ham's son, Canaan, saying, "A slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers." Amid the perplexities of Genesis, this is one of the most enigmatic stories, and it has been subjected to many bewildering interpretations--most notably that Ham was the original black man. To the gentry of the American South, the weird tale of Noah's curse justified slavery, and to Spake and his colonial contemporaries it spelled the history of Africa's peoples. On "contemplating these sons of Noah," he marveled that "as they were then, so they appear to be now.

The new calendar was only one of countless utopian measures the ruling Jacobins initiated in 1793–94, but it is notable because, apparently, not a single person had to be murdered to carry it out.

In 1863 Lincoln desegregated the White House staff, which initiated a desegregation of the federal government that lasted until Woodrow Wilson. Lincoln opened the White House to black callers, notably Frederick Douglass. He also continued to wrestle with his own racism, asking aides to investigate the feasibility of deporting (euphemistically termed colonizing) African Americans to Africa or Latin America.

This won me a couple of fans, notably with new neighbor Delicious, who shouted with surprise, P-I Piper! You got some nice titties! You got those TV titties!! They stand up on they own all perky and everything! Damn!

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by a group of former Confederate soldiers; its first grand wizard was a Confederate general who was also a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The Klan soon spread beyond the South to the Midwest and the West and became, in the words of historian Eric Foner, “the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.” The main point of the Klan’s orgy of violence was to prevent blacks from voting—voting, that is, for Republicans. Leading Democrats, including at least one president, two Supreme Court justices, and innumerable senators and congressmen, were Klan members. The last one, Robert Byrd, died in 2010 and was eulogized by President Obama and former President Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton called him her “mentor.” The sordid history of the Democratic Party in the early twentieth century is also married to the sordid history of the progressive movement during the same period. Progressives like Margaret Sanger—founder of Planned Parenthood and a role model for Hillary Clinton—supported such causes as eugenics and social Darwinism. While abortion was not an issue in Sanger’s day, she backed forced sterilization for “unfit” people, notably minorities. Sanger’s Negro Project was specifically focused on reducing the black population.

When finally the sky grew ink-black, the trees were visible only as their swaying branches blotted out the stars that crossed in blazing showers, as sometimes they do. The language of the stars, seldom read and heeded less, told beautifully and in silence of all the victories that had ever been won and all the defeats ever suffered. In uncountable lines of light across the widest sphere, the stars spoke of everything notable even down to a leaf blowing rhythmically in the wind.

Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would’ve expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics—instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on to save up and lovingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to come would make up for them all by developing into the meanest, cruelest bitch of a city, even among cities not notable for their kindness.

One notable example is the successful challenge led by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to a racist drug sting operation in Tulia, Texas. The 1999 drug bust incarcerated almost 15 percent of the black population of the town, based on the uncorroborated false testimony of a single informant hired by the sheriff of Tulia.

But most unsettling is how this time I notice my own fairness. I notice that while I might be a person of colour among the diaspora back home, or in any white-majority country, here I am the white person. Kashmiris are notable because there are so few of us left, and because we've taken up a privileged space in India. In Toronto, some Indian cab drivers will ask me where my family is from, and when I tell them, they think they're bonding with me when they talk about how much they hate Muslims. Or, in the case that the driver is Muslim, he'll try to bond with me over the trouble with 'the blacks.' All of us struggle towards whiteness.

Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would've expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics--instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on and save up and lovlingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to come would make up for them all by developing into the meanest, cruelest bitch of a city, even among cities not notable for their kindness. To all appearance resolute, adventurous, manly, the city would not shake that terrible all-night rape, when "he" was forced to submit, surrending, inadmissably, blindly feminine, into the Hellfire embrace of "her" beloved. He spent the years afterward forgetting and fabulating and trying to get back some self-respect. But inwardly, deep inside, "he" remained the catamite of Hell, the punk at the disposal of all the denizens thereof, the bitch in men's clothing.

Having been established by George Washington under the direction of the first Attorney General, the U.S. Marshals Service was filled with notable characters of the past such as the Earp Brothers—Wyatt, Morgan, and Virgil.  Others included Bat Masterson and Wild Bill Hickok, along with Bass Reeves who was the first black man to hold this prestigious position.

Gareth is a few years older than me at twenty, broad and sturdy with dark green eyes and black hair like the rest of us. But there’s one notable difference: Gareth’s black hair has a trace of silver highlights in it—very unusual in Gardnerians, and read by many as a sign of his less-than-pure blood. It’s been the source of relentless teasing all throughout his life.

The gap between white and black education, income, and mortality rates is as wide today as it was forty years ago.6 If you look into a hospital nursery and see a black infant and a white infant, you can predict which baby will die first, which one will make a higher income and have better education, just by the color of the baby’s skin. There is no area in American society (education, incarceration, income, preaching, and so on) where racial disparity isn’t operating.7 Martin Luther King Jr. could not have known how we would abuse his hope that we will not be judged by skin color but by character.8 King said nothing about blindness being a virtue. Jesus never praised blindness; on a notable occasions he healed it. When whites claim, “I am color-blind in my dealings with others,” it’s usually an indication of our ignorance of how we have been thoroughly indoctrinated into race. It’s like saying, “I am sinless,” meaning, “My sin is so dominant in this society that it just seems normal.” A first step is to name our whiteness. As James Baldwin said in The Fire Next Time, “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”9

Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same person or group. In Moby Dick, Ahab’s quest for the whale may be mad and “monomaniacal,” as it is frequently called, or even evil so far as he sacrifices his crew and ship to it, but evil or revenge are not the point of the quest. The whale itself may be only a “dumb brute,” as the mate says, and even if it were malignantly determined to kill Ahab, such an attitude, in a whale hunted to the death, would certainly be understandable if it were there. What obsesses Ahab is in a dimension of reality much further down than any whale, in an amoral and alienating world that nothing normal in the human psyche can directly confront. The professed quest is to kill Moby Dick, but as the portents of disaster pile up it becomes clear that a will to identify with (not adjust to) what Conrad calls the destructive element is what is really driving Ahab. Ahab has, Melville says, become a “Prometheus” with a vulture feeding on him. The axis image appears in the maelstrom or descending spiral (“vortex”) of the last few pages, and perhaps in a remark by one of Ahab’s crew: “The skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world.” But the descent is not purely demonic, or simply destructive: like other creative descents, it is partly a quest for wisdom, however fatal the attaining of such wisdom may be. A relation reminiscent of Lear and the fool develops at the end between Ahab and the little black cabin boy Pip, who has been left so long to swim in the sea that he has gone insane. Of him it is said that he has been “carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro . . . and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps.” Moby Dick is as profound a treatment as modern literature affords of the leviathan symbolism of the Bible, the titanic-demonic force that raises Egypt and Babylon to greatness and then hurls them into nothingness; that is both an enemy of God outside the creation, and, as notably in Job, a creature within it of whom God is rather proud. The leviathan is revealed to Job as the ultimate mystery of God’s ways, the “king over all the children of pride” (41:34), of whom Satan himself is merely an instrument. What this power looks like depends on how it is approached. Approached by Conrad’s Kurtz through his Antichrist psychosis, it is an unimaginable horror: but it may also be a source of energy that man can put to his own use. There are naturally considerable risks in trying to do so: risks that Rimbaud spoke of in his celebrated lettre du voyant as a “dérèglement de tous les sens.” The phrase indicates the close connection between the titanic and the demonic that Verlaine expressed in his phrase poète maudit, the attitude of poets who feel, like Ahab, that the right worship of the powers they invoke is defiance.

Mr. Clark Howell, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, telegraphed to a New York paper, among other words, the following, "I do not exaggerate when I say that Professor Booker T. Washington's address yesterday was one of the most notable speeches, both as to character and as to the warmth of its reception, ever delivered to a Southern audience. The address was a revelation. The whole speech is a platform upon which blacks and whites can stand with full justice to each other.

A 2016 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America suggested that health care providers may underestimate black patients' pain in part due to a belief that they simply don't actually feel as much pain - a myth that dates all the way back to the days of slavery. For centuries, the claim that black people were biologically different from whites was 'championed by scientists, physicians, and slave owners alike to justify slavery and the inhumane treatment of black men and women in medical research,' the authors wrote. Black people were thought to have 'thicker skulls, less sensitive nervous systems,' and a super-human ability to 'tolerate surgical operations with little, if any, pain at all.' In the first phase of the study, over two hundred white medical students and residents were asked whether a series of statements about differences between black and white patients were true or false. Some of the statements were true, while others - for example, 'blacks' skin is thicker than whites' and 'blacks' nerve endings are less sensitive than whites' - were false. They found that a full half of the respondents thought that one or more the false statements - many of which were 'fantastical in nature' - were possibly, probably, or definitely true. Also, notably, many of them didn't agree with the statements that were actually true; only half of the residents knew that white patients are less likely to have heart disease than black patients are. When asked to read case studies of two patients complaining of pain, one white and one black, the respondents who had endorsed more false beliefs were more likely to believe that the black patient felt less pain, and undertreated them accordingly.

One late afternoon, we crossed a creek and came upon a thicket of trees in the middle of a pasture quite a ways from Marlboro Man’s homestead. As I looked more closely, I saw that the trees were shrouding a small white house. A white picket fence surrounded the lot, and as we drove closer to the property, I noticed movement in the yard. It was a large, middle-aged woman, with long, gray hair cascading down her shoulders. She was pushing a lawn mower around her yard, and two wagtail dogs yipped and followed her every step. Most notably, she was wearing only underwear and what appeared to be a late model Playtex bra. And as we passed by her house, she glanced up at us for a moment…then kept on mowing. Trying to appear nonchalant, I asked Marlboro Man, “So…who was that?” Maybe this could be the start of another story. He looked at me and replied, “I have absolutely no idea.” We never spoke of her again.

Radically new spiritual movements are cropping up, notably the “atheist” practice of Syntheism. And musicians are creating stranger and stranger electrical sounds and rhythms, mixing them with strained voices, as if to underscore just how mysterious, yet peculiarly familiar, it all seems. And fashionable, tattooed young female DJ s play that music on the dance floor, and we dance under flashing lights into the darkness and get high and drunk and make out, as the reality we thought we knew is being torn down and we plunge into the sublime and the unknown. And far out into the desert, under the clear skies of that luminous, open blackness lit by perfect stars, we find each other in an intimate, loving embrace. Without the slightest effort we converse for hours and all of reality melts away as we let go of our inner shields and. become one. In that timeless moment of forgiving embrace we lose ourselves and find ourselves, both at once.

If she could push him out of her mind and enter his, what else could she do? What might she be able to do with regard to someone else? Someone less skilled, untrained in the ways of the Force? The single guard posted just inside the front of her cell, for example? “You!” He turned toward her, patently unconcerned and not a little bored. She studied him closely. As he was about to speak, she addressed him clearly and firmly—and not only with her voice. “You will remove these restraints. And you will leave this cell, with the door open, and retire to your living quarters.” The guard eyed her silently. He did not look in the least intimidated. Her confidence wavering as she shifted slightly in her bonds, she repeated what she had said with as much authority as she could muster. “You will remove these restraints. And you will leave this cell, with the door open, and retire to your living quarters. You will speak of this encounter to no one.” Raising the heavy, black-and-white rifle he held, he came toward her. Heart pounding, she watched him approach. Was she going to be killed, freed, or maybe laughed at? Halting before her, he looked down into her eyes. When he spoke again, there was a notable alteration in his voice. It was significantly less confrontational and—distant. “I will remove these restraints. And leave this cell, with the door open, and retire to my living quarters. I will speak of this encounter to no one.” Working methodically, he unlatched her shackles. He stood and stared at her for a moment, then turned and wordlessly started for the doorway. Lying in shock on the reclined platform, Rey hardly knew what to do next. She was free. No, she corrected herself: She was free of this cell. That hardly constituted freedom. But it was a beginning. As the guard reached the doorway, she spoke hastily. “And you will drop your weapon.” “I will drop my weapon,” he responded in the same uninflected voice. This he proceeded to do, setting the rifle down on the floor, then turning left into the outside corridor to depart in silence. For a long moment she stared at the open portal. Deciding that it was not a joke and that the guard was not waiting for her just outside the cell, she moved to pick up the weapon and leave. —

Lucille would tell this story differently. She would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable. Say that my mother was as tall as a man, and that she sometimes set me on her shoulders, so that I could splash my hands in the cold leaves above our heads. Say that my grandmother sang in her throat while she sat on her bed and we laced up her big black shoes. Such details are merely accidental. Who could know but us? And since their thoughts were bent upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses than we had seen, why must we be left, the survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable? Darkness is the only solvent.

Jews, notably, were defined as a ‘people’, while others, not even identified, were referred to only as ‘communities’. It was an extraordinary phrase that echoes down the decades and explains why Balfour is remembered a century later by Arabs as the architect of perfidy and disaster.16 Zionists, for opposite reasons, revere his memory; Balfour Street in Jerusalem is still the site of the official residence of the Israeli prime minister. The reservation had been inserted in the text to meet the strong objections raised by Lord Curzon, the former British viceroy of India and, as lord president of the council, an influential member of the war cabinet. Curzon – reflecting contemporary perceptions about the map and identity of the region – had referred to the ‘Syrian Arabs’ who had ‘occupied [Palestine] for the best part of 1,500 years’, and asked what would become of them. ‘They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter’, he predicted with the help of another then familiar biblical reference.17 The declaration’s second reservation – about the rights of Jews in other countries – was a response to the opposition of Edwin Montagu, the secretary of state for India, even though he was not in the war cabinet. Montagu was a Jewish grandee who feared that an official expression of sympathy for Zionism in fact masked anti-Semitic prejudice and would undermine the hard-won position of British Jews and their co-religionists elsewhere in the world. However, it did not weaken his vehement opposition, any more than the words about ‘non-Jewish communities’ assuaged Arab fears. Over time, Jewish attitudes to Zionism would change significantly; Arab attitudes, by and large, did not.

Recently, brain scans of schizophrenics taken while they were having auditory hallucinations have helped explain this ancient disorder. For example, when we silently talk to ourselves, certain parts of the brain light up on an MRI scan, especially in the temporal lobe (such as in Wernicke’s area). When a schizophrenic hears voices, the very same areas of the brain light up. The brain works hard to construct a consistent narrative, so schizophrenics try to make sense of these unauthorized voices, believing they originate from strange sources, such as Martians secretly beaming thoughts into their brains. Dr. Michael Sweeney of Ohio State writes, “Neurons wired for the sensation of sound fire on their own, like gas-soaked rags igniting spontaneously in a hot, dark garage. In the absence of sights and sounds in the surrounding environment, the schizophrenic’s brain creates a powerful illusion of reality.” Notably, these voices seem to be coming from a third party, who often gives the subject commands, which are mostly mundane but sometimes violent. Meanwhile, the simulation centers in the prefrontal cortex seem to be on automatic pilot, so in a way it’s as though the consciousness of a schizophrenic is running the same sort of simulations we all do, except they’re done without his permission. The person is literally talking to himself without his knowledge. HALLUCINATIONS The mind constantly generates hallucinations of its own, but for the most part they are easily controlled. We see images that don’t exist or hear spurious sounds, for example, so the anterior cingulate cortex is vital to distinguish the real from the manufactured. This part of the brain helps us distinguish between stimuli that are external and those that are internally generated by the mind itself. However, in schizophrenics, it is believed that this system is damaged, so that the person cannot distinguish real from imaginary voices. (The anterior cingulate cortex is vital because it lies in a strategic place, between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. The link between these two areas is one of the most important in the brain, since one area governs rational thinking, and the other emotions.) Hallucinations, to some extent, can be created on demand. Hallucinations occur naturally if you place someone in a pitch-black room, an isolation chamber, or a creepy environment with strange noises. These are examples of “our eyes playing tricks on us.” Actually, the brain is tricking itself, internally creating false images, trying to make sense of the world and identify threats. This effect is called “pareidolia.” Every time we look at clouds in the sky, we see images of animals, people, or our favorite cartoon characters. We have no choice. It is hardwired into our brains. In a sense, all images we see, both real and virtual, are hallucinations, because the brain is constantly creating false images to “fill in the gaps.” As we’ve seen, even real images are partly manufactured. But in the mentally ill, regions of the brain such as the anterior cingulate cortex are perhaps damaged, so the brain confuses reality and fantasy.

Also weighing in with generally positive reviews were two notable outside scholars. Richard P. Howard, Reorganized Latter Day Saint Church historian, wrote in the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal praising the volume’s skillful handling of “the complex development of racism, anti-slavery attitudes, anti-abolitionism, and the controversial origins of the black priesthood denial.” He, however, felt that it did “not go nearly far enough . . . to document the interaction between Mormonism and the wider cultural values which tended until the 1960s to legitimate the racist position of the church during all of its previous history.” He also faulted the volume for what he saw as its all too brief discussion of the concurrent treatment of blacks within the RLDS Church—such denomination having had accepted blacks in full equality since 1865. But he concluded that “Saints, Slaves, and Blacks should be a high priority on the reading lists of the scholars, leaders, and members of all institutional expressions of Mormonism.”28

We can’t afford to winter here, we’ll have to move while we can still get out to sea.” “Fine with me. I’m not sure I can take even another week here. The food—” “Not a Meat Olaf fancier, I gather.” “Can anything be done?” “Well, it’s supposed to be for emergencies, but I guess this qualifies as one.” Unlocking a black valise and gazing inside for a moment. “Here you go,” handing over an ancient hand-blown bottle whose label, carefully engraved and printed in an unfaded spectrum of tropical colors, showed an erupting volcano, a parrot with a disdainful smile and the legend ¡Cuidado Cabrón! Salsa Explosiva La Original. “Couple of drops is all you’ll need really to light that Meat Olaf right up, not that I’m being stingy, understand. My father handed this on to me, as did his father to him, and it isn’t down by even a quarter of an inch yet, so do exercise caution’s all I’m saying.” As expected, this advice was ignored, and next mealtime the bottle got passed around and everybody slopped on the salsa. The evening that resulted was notable for hysteria and recrimination. The luxuriant world of the parrot on the label, though seemingly as remote from this severe ice-scape as could be imagined, in fact was separated from it by only the thinnest of membranes. To get from one to the other one had only to fill one’s attention unremittingly with the bird’s image, abasing oneself meantime before his contempt, and repeat “¡Cuidado cabrón!” preferably with a parrot accent, until the phrase no longer had meaning—though in practice, of course, the number of repetitions was known to run into the millions, even as it ran listeners’ forbearance into the ground. In thus acquiring some of the force of a Tibetan prayer-wheel, the practice was thought to serve as an open-sesame to the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra country as well, a point which old Expedition hands were not reluctant to bring up.

Being Khmer, as far as Tevy can tell, can't be reduced to the brown skin, black hair, and prominent cheekbones that she shares with her mother and sister. Khmer-ness can manifest as anything, from the color of your cuticles to the particular way your butt goes numb when you sit in a chair too long, and even so, Tevy has recognized nothing she has ever done as being notably Khmer.

Green tea contains large concentrations of a group of powerful antioxidants called catechins; notably one called epigallocatechin-3-gallate. Catechins may play a role in inhibiting carbohydrate-digestive enzymes, resulting in lower glucose levels34 and protecting the pancreatic beta cells.35 Fermentation (black tea) changes the catechins to a variety of theaflavins,36 making the antioxidant potential of green tea and black tea comparable. Polyphenols in green tea are also believed to boost metabolism,37 which may aid in fat burning.38 Many health benefits have been ascribed to green-tea consumption, including increased fat oxidation during exercise,39 increased resting energy expenditure,40 lower risk of various types of cancer.41

These are some mighty men about to hit the stage," an unseen announcer screamed through the PA system. "With an average height of six-foot-four, a massive weight of three hundred thirty pounds - all of it rock-solid muscle - they are nationally ranked power lifters, some of whom bench-press over six hundred pounds! And they're not here to brag on their muscles, but to brag on Jesus." The eight members of the Power Team ran up to the stage on thunderous feet, wearing red, black, and blue warm-up suits, weight belts, and boxing shoes. To a man, they were as big as a semitrailer truck. They pumped their fists in the air and stood before us bouncing lightly on the balls of their feet, ready to kick some religious butt. "Fasten your seat belts. If God is for you, who can be against you?" "Woo! Woo! Woo!" the audience screamed, instantly ready to rock and roll. We were less than an hour into the first night of a six-night revival, and already it seemed that Sin was going down in a terminal headlock, and Grand Junction would never be the same.... I had heard about the Power Team not from Christian friends, but from a succession of potheads - quintessential late-night cable TV channel surfers. To the stoned, there is nothing more entertaining than the sudden, near hallucinatory vision of this troupe of power-lifting missionaries led by former Oral Roberts University football star John Jacobs.... [My nephew] bought a comic book in which John Jacobs and the Power Team defeat a lisping South American drug lord. From that and an orientation video, we learned that the Team conducts seventy crusades each year, saves close to a million souls here and abroad - notably in Russia - and consists of "world-class athletes who inspire people to follow Christ - and to move away from drugs, alcohol, and suicide." (At the same time, we were pressured not to let our long-distance dollars go to support "nudity, profanity, or the Gay Games." We could avoid this by signing up with Lifeline, a Christian long-distance provider.)" People Who Sweat: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Pursuits, pp. 126-8.

Hannah tells me that you helped protect her from the Hispanics during the riot.” “The Hispanics? Oh, the protest, right.” “Call it what you like, son. This place was crawling with spics, and I am grateful that you took care of my only child.” “Well,” I shrugged. “I guess that’s what boyfriends do.” Spics?? “Only good boyfriends,” Hannah said, still tightly holding my left hand. I could never predict when she’d pour on the affection and when she’d act distant. Were all girlfriends this complicated? “I helped pass that law, you understand,” Mr. Walker said. “I’m an advisor to the senator, and it’s about time someone notable, someone of prestige, took a stand on the influx of hispanics into our once great city. The Hispanics were rioting because of that law, because they’re afraid of justice.” “Oh yeah?” I said. I knew nothing about politics or laws. But I had a feeling I disagreed with him. “But I’ll discontinue this tangent before I begin to preach,” he smiled. “Hannah is giving me the warning look.” “Thank you, Daddy,” Hannah said. “The spics destroyed your car,” he said. “Hannah informed me, and then I read the report in the newspaper.” “That was a good car,” I nodded. “I will miss it.” “Well, let me see what I can do to help,” he said. “I’m a financial consultant to many of our nation’s finest automobile manufacturers, including Mission Motorcycles. You have heard of them?” “I don’t know much about any cars. Or motorcycles,” I admitted. “Well, it just so happens, they owed me a favor and agreed to give me a short-term loan on one of their new electric bikes,” he said. And it was then that I realized we were standing beside a gleaming black, silver, and orange motorcycle. I hadn’t noticed before because our school parking lot always looks like a luxury car showcase, and I’d grown numb to the opulence. A sleek black helmet hung from each handle. Mr. Walker placed his palm on the seat and said, “This bike is yours. Until you get a new car.” “Wow,” I breathed. A motorcycle!! “Isn’t it sexy?” Hannah smiled. “It looks like it’s from the future.” “It does,” I agreed. “I’m almost afraid to touch it, like it’ll fly off. But sir, there’s no way…” “Please don’t be so ungrateful as to refuse, son. That’s low class, and that’s not the Walkers. You are in elite company. Dating my daughter has advantages, as I’m sure she’s told you. You just keep performing on the football field.” “Oh…right,” I said. “I’m gratified I can help,” Mr. Walker said and shook my hand again. “I’m expecting big things from you. Don’t let me down. It’s electric, so you’ll need to charge it at night. Fill out the paperwork in the storage compartment and return them signed to Hannah tomorrow. If you wreck it, I’ll have you drowned off Long Beach. I wish I could stay, but I’m late for a meeting with the Board of Supervisors. Hannah, tell your mother I’ll be out late,” he said and got into the back seat of a black sedan that whisked him away.

This curious coalition of Muslims and Marxists had picked Watts, Allen wrote, because blacks were actually rather well off there: “[I]f Watts could be exploded they could do it anywhere else in America.” So they had flooded the area with propaganda, most notably a “publicity campaign rivaling the Advertising Council’s promotion of Smokey the Bear” aimed at “the construction of the myth of police brutality.” With

One of the more interesting stories in pig evolution during domestication concerns the culture-specific nature of this artificial selection, most notably the black coloration characteristic of Chinese breeds.

It is notable that both people specifically scapegoated as the first to fall ill were black men.

Joining the ranks of some notables who had penned powerful stuff behind bars. Saint Paul, the apostle. John Bunyan. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Martin Luther King Jr. But,

Joining the ranks of some notables who had penned powerful stuff behind bars. Saint Paul, the apostle. John Bunyan. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Martin Luther King Jr.

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence—not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be—its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of the injury, unable to summon the face of their violator. Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would’ve expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics—instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on to save up and lovingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to come would make up for them all by developing into the meanest, cruelest bitch of a city, even among cities not notable for their kindness. To all appearance resolute, adventurous, manly, the city could not shake that terrible all-night rape, when “he” was forced to submit, surrendering, inadmissably, blindly feminine, into the Hellfire embrace of “her” beloved. He spent the years afterward forgetting and fabulating and trying to get back some self-respect. But inwardly, deep inside, “he” remained the catamite of Hell, the punk at the disposal of all the denizens thereof, the bitch in men’s clothing. So,

I spotted Delilah instantly. She was one of a handful of people quietly attending the room’s lone baccarat table, and the only non-Asian in sight. She was dressed plainly, in black pants and a black, shoulderless top. Her hair was pulled back and I saw no signs of makeup or jewelry. If she’d been trying to downplay her looks, though, she hadn’t been notably successful. I checked the usual hotspots and saw nothing that set off any alarms. So far, my assessment that she wouldn’t yet do anything precipitous seemed correct. But it was too soon to really know. After all, the casino, with its cameras, guards, and other forms of security, would have made a poor place for an ambush. An attack, if one were to come, would happen later.

Misnaming, renaming, and obscuring names is emblematic of colonialism. During Spanish colonization in New Mexico, names of people and places in Indigenous languages were renamed using the Spanish language. During U.S. colonization, Spanish names were changed to suit English speakers (i.e., Alburquerque to Albuquerque). Take, for example, one of the sacred mountains in my community. The Tewa name is Tu’u jo ping.18 The Spanish renamed it la mesita huerfana (the little orphan mountain). Today, it is known mostly as Black Mesa. You will see this phenomenon as a broader problem in nuclear colonialism throughout this book. Other scholars continue this colonial mechanism of misnaming and misspelling even as they try to examine nuclear colonialism. For example, in Lucie Genay’s (2019) monograph, Land of Nuclear Enchantment: A New Mexican History of the Nuclear Weapons Industry, she misspells multiple New Mexico place names throughout the book, notably Los Lunas, where I currently live, which she calls “Las Lunes” (114), and the Indigenous community of Church Rock, where the notable 1979 uranium spill occurred, which she writes as “Chuck Rock” (12, 179). These types of misspellings, whether intentional or accidental, are inexcusable. It is how histories are erased, particularly by outsiders.19 More importantly, it contributes to the creation of intergenerational trauma. There is nothing “enchanting” about New Mexico’s nuclear history, and even joking about your time spent in the land of “entrapment,”20 as Genay does, capitalizes on a culture that she knows very little about. Nuevomexicanas/os are not her intended audience; she writes for the academy. She gives her audience what they want: an exotic setting where exotic things occurred.

At the height of the George Floyd protests, Omar Johnson, a former Apple marketing VP and chief marketing officer for Beats by Dr. Dre, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times. “Dear White corporate America,” he began,… I get it. I know you have the best intentions.… You want to do the right thing. But you just don’t know how. Is that about right? I know it is, because you’ve been calling me. For the past two weeks, several times a day. It’s been the same question: What can I do? He went on to upbraid corporate leaders for failing to nurture Black talent, for failing to include Black people in decision-making, for failing to listen, and ultimately, for failing as businesspeople: “This is a business problem, too. And you fix business problems all the time. So, you got this.” He laid out a game plan. Most notably, “You need to hire more Black people. Period.” Identify, recruit, develop, and elevate talented Black employees. Partner with Black-owned businesses. Believe in the people you hire. Mentor them. “No doubt, it’s daunting,” Johnson writes. “But lean into the discomfort.” And “before you call me again—before you ask me what you should say, or what you should change—I’ll tell you my answer right now: Absolutely everything… See you in the room.

History shows that epidemics have been the great resetter of countries’ economy and social fabric. Why should it be different with COVID-19? A seminal paper on the long-term economic consequences of major pandemics throughout history shows that significant macroeconomic after-effects can persist for as long as 40 years, substantially depressing real rates of return.[18] This is in contrast to wars that have the opposite effect: they destroy capital while pandemics do not – wars trigger higher real interest rates, implying greater economic activity, while pandemics trigger lower real rates, implying sluggish economic activity. In addition, consumers tend to react to the shock by increasing their savings, either because of new precautionary concerns, or simply to replace the wealth lost during the epidemic. On the labour side, there will be gains at the expense of capital since real wages tend to rise after pandemics. As far back as the Black Death that ravaged Europe from 1347 to 1351 (and that suppressed 40% of Europe’s population in just a few years), workers discovered for the first time in their life that the power to change things was in their hands. Barely a year after the epidemic had subsided, textile workers in Saint-Omer (a small city in northern France) demanded and received successive wage rises. Two years later, many workers’ guilds negotiated shorter hours and higher pay, sometimes as much as a third more than their pre-plague level. Similar but less extreme examples of other pandemics point to the same conclusion: labour gains in power to the detriment of capital. Nowadays, this phenomenon may be exacerbated by the ageing of much of the population around the world (Africa and India are notable exceptions), but such a scenario today risks being radically altered by the rise of automation,

LINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES Phonological: BASL signers are more likely to produce two-handed signs, use an overall larger signing space, and tend to produce more signs on the lower half of the face. Syntactical: A higher incidence of syntactic repetition appears in multiple studies of BASL signers. A study documented in 2011 also showed more frequent use of constructed dialogue and constructed action among Black signers. Lexical Variation: Some signs developed at Black Deaf schools diverge completely from standard ASL signs, mostly for everyday objects and activities discussed frequently by students. Linguists have also noticed an increase in lexical borrowing of words and idioms from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) among younger Black signers. Due to the prevalence of the oral method in white deaf education after the Milan Conference, many white deaf children were denied access to American Sign Language, and ASL was subjugated by spoken English. However, significantly fewer resources were dedicated to Black deaf education, leaving many Black Deaf schools to pursue manual language. As such, scholars note that some variations common in BASL, like a higher incidence of two-handed signs, are actually a preservation of the linguistic qualities of early ASL. (Jump to “ASL, origins of.”) NOTABLE PEOPLE Platt H. Skinner, abolitionist and founder of The School for Colored Deaf Dumb and Blind Children, circa 1858. (Jump to “Directory of U.S. Black Deaf Schools.”) Carl Croneberg, a Swedish-American Deaf linguist, was the first person to note differences between ASL and BASL in writing, as coauthor of the 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language on its Linguistic Principles (see also: William Stokoe). Dr. Carolyn McCaskill’s 2011 book, The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure, features data from a series of studies performed by McCaskill and her team, and is considered a foundational work in the field.

As for the claims by the Congolese historian Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem (“13 million killed” in 1998, then “5 to 10 million killed” in 2008), they are hard to keep track of. Initially, the starting year for his assertions was 1880 (five years before the EIC was founded and ten years before any rubber harvesting) while the latter estimate extended the end year to 1930 (22 years after the EIC). A second edition of the latter estimate, without explanation, moved up the starting date to 1885. Ndaywel cites no data or methods. All three editions of his book merely cite Moulin. It is notable that in a lengthy essay on the EIC published in L’Histoire in 2020, Ndaywel no longer makes any specific population claims, asserting only that the effects of the EIC were “worse than grim” (“plus que macabres”). In the end, Ndaywel is not credible. His works are published by the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium because he is black. This helps them to “decolonize Eurocentric narratives,” which means using blacks as shadow puppets to shield their radical accounts from criticism.

We are not yet at a time in America when the attributed or perceived actions of a brown or black or queer or Muslim “wrongdoer” are considered singular. Instead, such accused are seen as emblematic of an entire demographic, one labeled guilty before charged. And yet, the overwhelming majority of spree killers from the most notable mass shootings in U.S. history are male and white.

Concern about the “enemy within” was linked to a politics of paranoia. The conspiracy theories that had been pushed to the fore in Europe at the time of the French Revolutionary Wars in the 1790s, a period in which there was a widespread belief in secret societies, some allegedly long-lasting, influenced the subsequent account of both present politics and the recent past. Earlier concerns about secret movements, notably the Freemasons and the Illuminati, both supposedly responsible for the French Revolution, were played through a new context from the 1790s, and these concerns were made more open and “democratic,” in large part through the culture of print and rising literacy.1

The collapse of solidarity and security for many western European working people after the 1970s was compounded by the postwar flood of Third World immigrants into western Europe. When times were good, the immigrants were welcome to do the dirty jobs that the national labor force now spurned. When Europeans began to face long-term structural unemployment for the first time since the Great Depression, however, immigrants became unwelcome. Moreover, European immigration had changed. Whereas earlier immigrants had come from southern or eastern Europe and differed only slightly from their new hosts (with the notable and significant exception of Jews from eastern Europe in the 1880s and the 1930s), the new immigrants came from former colonial territories: North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, and Turkey. And whereas earlier immigrants (some Jews again excepted) had tended to assimilate quickly and disappear, the new immigrants often clung to visibly different customs and religions. Europeans had to learn to coexist with permanent African, Indian, and Islamic communities that flaunted their separate identities. The immigrant threat was not only economic and social. The immigrants were seen increasingly as undermining national identity with their alien customs, languages, and religions. A global youth culture, mostly marketed by Americans and often associated with black performers, did to local cultural traditions what the global economy had done to local smokestack industry. Anti-immigrant resentment was pay dirt for radical Right movements in western Europe after the 1970s. It was the main force behind the British National Front. The most successful of them—Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France and Jörg Haider’s Freiheitspartei in Austria—were almost entirely devoted to exploiting anti-immigrant fears, fighting multiculturalism and an alleged immigrant criminal propensity, and proposing the expulsion of the alien poor.

In 1908, English humorist Israel Zangwill staged a play titled The Melting Pot. It told the story of two Russian immigrants, David and Vera, who move to the United States, fall in love, and live happily ever after. This play’s title became a rallying cry for the high aspiration that the United States would be a place of multiethnic assimilation. But long before the United States, the Church was history’s original melting pot. As Acts 13 opens, we meet a group of churchmen who come from notably disparate backgrounds: “Now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a member of the court of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul” (v. 1). Barnabas was a well-known Jewish teacher and cousin to Mark (cf. Colossians 4: 10). Some believe that at one point he was better known than Paul, for early in Acts, his name is placed first when the two are paired (cf. Acts 11: 30, 12: 25, 13: 7). Simeon and Lucius hailed from Africa. Niger, Simeon’s surname, is a Latin word meaning “black,” indicating possible African origins. Lucius is said to have come from Cyrene, a Roman province on the north coast of Africa. Manaen is “a member of the court of Herod the tetrarch,” that is, Herod Antipas, the ruler who beheaded John the Baptist (cf. Matthew 14: 1–12). The Greek word for “member of the court” is syntrophos, meaning, “brought up with.” Thus, Manaen had probably known Herod all his life. Finally, there is Saul, the famed Jewish antagonist turned evangelist. These are the leaders of the church at Antioch. What a group! And yet, for all their differences, they are united in Christ. Indeed, when the Spirit says, “Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I called them” (Acts 13: 2), there is no quibbling over the Spirit’s appointments. No one protests, “But I wanted to be set apart!” Rather, they gladly lay their hands on these men, ordaining them into their appointed office (cf. 13: 3). Such is the Church: different people from different backgrounds doing different things under one Head, Who is Christ. The Church is a melting pot. But it is not a melting pot in which people’s individual personalities and gifts are congealed into some bland soup. Rather, people’s unique personalities and gifts are deployed according to the Spirit’s purposes. And we, who are “from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Revelation 5: 9), are part of this Church. What a glorious group we are in Christ!

Although he (Senator Robert Byrd) apologized numerous times for what he considered a youthful indiscretion, his early votes in Congress---notably a filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act---reflected racially separatist views.

Nevertheless, two centuries later the idea that nonliving matter could give rise to life remained a widely accepted view, and it was vehemently defended—most notably by the eminent German chemist Justus von Liebig (1803–1873), one of Pasteur’s bitterest opponents.

Having once gained access to the Grande Armée, Shigella bacteria were richly endowed to overcome the body’s defenses. A notable feature of dysentery is the small number of bacteria needed to infect a human host. In addition, Shigellosis provides patients who recover with no acquired immunity as a defense against further episodes. Nor is there crossover immunity from one species of the Shigella genus to another.

This suspicion and ignorance seriously complicated the work of the campaign, and a major effort was devoted to finding ways to overcome it. These included education, sermons advocating quinine, the previously mentioned health stations, and public health displays in which village notables demonstrated their confidence by publicly swallowing the medication.

Notably Tebow, while honoring his creator, never interrupted any flag ceremony or disrespected anyone at all, and yet in the eyes of many Americans he was blackballed by the NFL---solely because of his moral and religious stance. When this occurred, there was no concern expressed by liberals that somehow Tebow's rights were extinguished, or that it was unfair that he no longer plays football.

In this country of mind-boggling diversity for its small size, there were three groups: Christians, the minority to whom the departing colonial rulers had given the power to dominate; Sunni Muslims, the traditional bourgeois merchant class, city dwellers who also swelled the ranks of the bureaucracy; and Shia Muslims, forgotten and downtrodden, who tilled the soil for potatoes or cannabis in the Beqaa Valley or picked tobacco in the south. In the cities, Shias were the shoeshine boys, the newspaper sellers, the restaurant busboys. There were Shia landowners, but they, too, lorded it over the others. There were also Shia notables and politicians like Husseini,

A notable few seconds of silence ensued before she heard a man speak. "What a delightful coincidence." Startled by the familiar voice, she turned around to find herself gazing upon Martin, of all people, standing in his own open doorway, his hand still upon the knob. He wore formal evening attire- a black suit with a white waistcoat and bow tie made of the finest silk money could buy. His hair was thick and shiny black like wicked midnight, falling in attractive waves to his broad shoulders. His blue eyes were heavy-lidded and openly sensual.

Quoting page 60: In the 1960s, racism was chiefly understood to mean discrimination by whites against African-Americans. But in the immigration debate of the Progressive Era, the nation’s most prominent black leaders—most notably the Republican conservative, Booker T. Washington, and the socialist intellectual, W.E.B. DuBois—supported the restrictionists. Washington, in his famous Atlanta address at the Cotton States Exposition in 1895, pleaded with industrial leaders to employ loyal, hardworking freedmen, rather than import millions of European immigrants to take the industrial jobs that otherwise might have freed native-born African-Americans from segregated misery in the rural South.

Dave Chappelle performed a hysterical skit of a blind White supremacist, who thinks he is White, and who spits out anti-Black ideas like tobacco. In the end he tragically—or, for the viewer, comically—learns he is a Black man. Of all the notable antiracist sketches he did, that first sketch of the racist Black man may have been Chappelle’s most clever and memorable.

Homer used two adjectives to describe aspects of the colour blue: kuaneos, to denote a dark shade of blue merging into black; and glaukos, to describe a sort of ‘blue-grey’, notably used in Athena’s epithet glaukopis, her ‘grey-gleaming eyes’. He describes the sky as big, starry, or of iron or bronze (because of its solid fixity). The tints of a rough sea range from ‘whitish’ (polios) and ‘blue-grey’ (glaukos) to deep blue and almost black (kuaneos, melas). The sea in its calm expanse is said to be ‘pansy-like’ (ioeides), ‘wine-like’ (oinops), or purple (porphureos). But whether sea or sky, it is never just ‘blue’. In fact, within the entirety of ancient Greek literature you cannot find a single pure blue sea or sky.

First, they should close their eyes and feel. And then write what they felt. Some of the notable works of literature (which includes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, science fiction and so on) were written from an abundance of feelings. If you don’t feel what you have written, don’t expect someone else to feel it too. (Unless, you want to be too intellectual and write drab college textbooks.)

There are now a number of demands being made on teachers which challenge both your courage to be flexible and your courage to remain faithful to ideals which are good. I will try to deal with just two of these demands. The first one demands flexibility. It asks you to recognize that Negro children in this society—and white children also—are being taught biased, edited, and ultimately racist versions of American history and culture. It is not enough to pay lip service to the idea of racial harmony and equality. We must refuse any longer to accept the distorted view of our roots and our past in this country. As taught in our textbooks, this history reinforces in white children the notion that they are superior and the only creators of this country, and it reinforces in black children the notion that they are inferior and made no contributions. It may be true that most blacks came here as slaves, but the first of them were here as free men, and gave their lives in the struggle to win independence for this nation. They fought as well as any one else during the civil war; they played their part in the opening of the American West; they helped plan and lay out some of our major American cities; they developed the only indigenous form of American music; they made notable contributions to scientific research; they are to be found in the growth and development of the American musical and dramatic stage; and the best of their writing ranks with the best that has been done in America. This is by no means all, but then I am by no means an historian. In any case, the question is not whether they should have done more. The miracle is that in the circumstances of their history here they could have done so much. It is because of racism, it is because the dominant value judgments in this society are white, and it is because a consistently poor estimate has been placed on the quality and extent of Negro effort—it is for all these reasons that the true story of the Negro in America is not told in our history books. And it is for all these reasons that historians continue to tell lies, continue to avert their eyes, and continue to retard the progress of civility, decency, and human dignity in our society. It is time, then, to give up that old rigid stance. For, however comforting it may be to some, it is a delusion, and it is a violation of the right of all young minds to know the truth and to be free. Organized teachers can play a major role in the effort to liberate American history books. They can join those who are making an effort to bring truth into the schools through a total revision of the textbooks. Where good texts are not in existence, teachers must bring in supplementary material to the classes. And they themselves can make studies of Negro history and culture.

Entire communities were founded by and for the tuberculous, including most notably Colorado Springs and Pasadena.

There isn’t anything notably, individually racist about the people who work in all of the institutions he interacts with. Some of these people will be black themselves. But it doesn’t really matter what race they are. They are both in and of a society that is structurally racist, and so it isn’t surprising when these unconscious biases seep out into the work they do when they interact with the general public. With a bias this entrenched, in too many levels of society, our black man can try his hardest, but he is essentially playing a rigged game.

This point was driven home for me for the first time when I was traveling in Asia in 1978 on a trip to a forest monastery in northeastern Thailand, Wat Ba Pong, on the Thai-Lao border. I was taken there by my meditation teacher, Jack Kornfield, who was escorting a group of us to meet the monk under whom he had studied at that forest hermitage. This man, Achaan Chaa, described himself as a “simple forest monk,” and he ran a hundred-acre forest monastery that was simple and old-fashioned, with one notable exception. Unlike most contemporary Buddhist monasteries in Thailand, where the practice of meditation as the Buddha had taught had all but died out, Achaan Chaa’s demanded intensive meditation practice and a slow, deliberate, mindful attention to the mundane details of everyday life. He had developed a reputation as a meditation master of the first order. My own first impressions of this serene environment were redolent of the newly extinguished Vietnam War, scenes of which were imprinted in my memory from years of media attention. The whole place looked extraordinarily fragile to me. On my first day, I was awakened before dawn to accompany the monks on their early morning alms rounds through the countryside. Clad in saffron robes, clutching black begging bowls, they wove single file through the green and brown rice paddies, mist rising, birds singing, as women and children knelt with heads bowed along the paths and held out offerings of sticky rice or fruits. The houses along the way were wooden structures, often perched on stilts, with thatched roofs. Despite the children running back and forth laughing at the odd collection of Westerners trailing the monks, the whole early morning seemed caught in a hush. After breakfasting on the collected food, we were ushered into an audience with Achaan Chaa. A severe-looking man with a kindly twinkle in his eyes, he sat patiently waiting for us to articulate the question that had brought us to him from such a distance. Finally, we made an attempt: “What are you really talking about? What do you mean by ‘eradicating craving’?” Achaan Chaa looked down and smiled faintly. He picked up the glass of drinking water to his left. Holding it up to us, he spoke in the chirpy Lao dialect that was his native tongue: “You see this goblet? For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on a shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”5 Achaan Chaa was not just talking about the glass, of course, nor was he speaking merely of the phenomenal world, the forest monastery, the body, or the inevitability of death. He was also speaking to each of us about the self. This self that you take to be so real, he was saying, is already broken.