We will have taken one giant step forward when we face this reality: Powerful people never teach powerless people how to take their power away from them.
Interpretation
Power dynamics often prevent the powerful from educating the powerless about reclaiming their autonomy.
This quote emphasizes the uncomfortable truth that those in power have little incentive to empower those who lack it. It suggests that true progress in society occurs when individuals acknowledge this imbalance and actively seek to change it, promoting education and awareness that can lead to empowerment for the less fortunate.
In practice
In a speech on social justice, this quote can illustrate the necessity of empowerment programs.
I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.
As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.
Anytime someone says your God is ugly and you release your God and join their God, there is no hope for your freedom until you once more believe in your own concept of the 'deity.'
The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people. In order to do this, they had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they had previously known abut the Africans.
I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.
Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.
Being the Stream Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the stream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream, so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies. Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totally into it.
The whole point of being alive is to evolve into the complete person you were intended to be.
I wish I could say something classy and inspirational, but that just wouldn't be our style. ... Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. Glory... lasts forever.
The young are so old, they are born with their fingers crossed.
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.
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