The minute you understand racism, you're responsible for being racist. It's like eating from the tree of knowledge.
Interpretation
Understanding racism brings with it a moral obligation to address it.
Lynda Barry's quote emphasizes that gaining knowledge about racism incurs a responsibility to actively confront and combat it. Just as eating from the tree of knowledge in various narratives implies awareness and accountability, understanding racism necessitates a commitment to challenge prejudiced beliefs and actions within oneself and society.
In practice
During a diversity training session to encourage participants to recognize their biases.
In my writing class, we never, ever talk about the writing - ever. We never address a story that's been read. I also won't let anyone look at the person who's reading. No eye contact; everybody has to draw a spiral. And I would like to do a drawing class where we could talk about anything except for the drawing. No one could even mention it.
When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.
The radio was on and that was the first time I heard that song, the one I hate. Whenever I hear it all I can think of is that very day riding in the front seat with Lucy leaning against me and the smell of Juicy Fruit making me want to throw up. How can a song do that? Be like a net that catches a whole entire day, even a day whose guts you hate? You hear it and all of a sudden everything comes hanging back in front of you, all tangled up in that music.
The groove is so mysterious. We're born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away. I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.
I believe a kid who is playing is not alone. There is something brought alive during play, and this something, when played with, seems to play back.
Playing and fun are not the same thing, though when we grow up we may forget that and find ourselves mixing up playing with happiness. There can be a kind of amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves.
Manifest the divinity within you and everything will be harmoniously arranged around it.
The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time? Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?
The suffering may be moral or physical; and in my opinion it is just as absurd to call a man a coward who destroys himself, as to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever.
Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame might be ever-lasting.
Whoever realizes that the six senses aren't real, that the five aggregates are fictions, that no such things can be located anywhere in the body, understands the language of Buddhas.
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