I recently shared M. Shawn Copeland’s description of solidarity as a way of relating that has material consequences: it’s not just an ideal, it’s an ethic. In this passage, Copeland explains how solidarity also relies on our memories of past ways of relating, specifically our memories of trauma and suffering. Solidarity is an intentional moral and […]
What’s underfoot
A few months ago I began listening closely to the lyrics of the Laura Mvula song “Diamonds.” “Sometimes the grass ain’t greener on the other side,” Mvula sings. “But you’ve got diamonds under your feet.” These lyrics remind me of a saying sometimes attributed to James Oppenheim: “The foolish seeks happiness in the distance. The […]
Copeland: Deeper change is needed
The nineteenth-century notion of linear progress not only has collapsed but decayed. The cynical retreat of the nation-state, regressive programs of structural adjustment, repressive taxation, rising oil prices, gross inflation, market manipulation, food shortages, pandemics, drought, and wars have trapped not only the peoples of the two-thirds world but most of the rest of us […]
Quote: What we’re freed for
From M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom: Freedom from enslavement was freedom for being human. Only by analogy could the words of the Emancipation Proclamation change the order of creation, but it did remove God’s black human creatures from the plantation ledger. Statutory freedom amended the social and political status of the enslaved people. It was […]
