As well as giving us the ability to support international liberation movements and trade ideas and strategies with people all over the world in an instant via social media, interdependence also means arms- and knees-deep relationship with systems, ideologies, and people who use their power to cause others harm… There’s no way to live in […]
Resisting conventional waste
Imagine the power of entire teams of people who know who they are and bring their whole selves into collaborative relationships. Imagine communities filled with people who reach out to other people they respect and whose work they love enough to amplify without drama, score-keeping, or the hope of extra credit. Relationships win the race! “These are counter-cultural priorities, […]
Resistance
An ex-slave woman told of the doctrine of resistance passed onto her by her slave mother, who refused to be whipped by slave owners. The daughter claimed that: ‘…The one doctrine of my mother’s teaching which was branded upon my senses was that I should never let anyone abuse me.’ The heart of the slave […]
Serving the micro by changing the macro
On the blog Ask A Manager, author Alison Green offers job-seekers and employees advice on interacting with their supervisors, managing relationships with colleagues, and developing their careers. A few weeks ago, Green responded to a question from someone who had forbidden an employee from taking time off to attend their graduation. The letter-writer had granted […]
Freedom delayed isn’t freedom.
I’d never even heard of Juneteenth until I started living in Texas. The international mythology around US abolitionism and emancipation is, like British abolitionist mythology, so thick that no one had ever told me it took the enslaved people of Texas two and half years to discover that President Lincoln’s executive order had taken effect […]
Breaking Out of Holidays, Breaking into Life
The start of the 2015 Lenten season coincided with the birthdays of writers Toni Morrison (b. 1931) and Audre Lorde (b. 1934). Lorde died in 1992, just a year before Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Had she survived breast cancer, Lorde would have been 81 years old this year. Morrison is now 84. […]