We have been educated into believing someone else's concept of the deity, and someone else's standard of beauty. You have the right to practice any religion and politics in a way that best suits your freedom, your dignity, and your understanding. And once you do that, you don't apologize.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of personal belief systems and individual freedom.
John Henrik Clarke's quote reflects on how societal norms can shape our understanding of spirituality and aesthetics. It encourages individuals to embrace their own perspectives on religion and beauty, advocating for personal freedom, dignity, and authenticity without the need for apologies to others. This speaks to the importance of individual agency in defining one's own truth in a world filled with external expectations.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the importance of individual beliefs in a diverse society.
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.
My life is not this steeply sloping hour, in which you see me hurrying. Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree; I am only one of my many mouths, and at that, the one that will be still the soonest. I am the rest between two notes, which are somehow always in discord because Death’s note wants to climb over— but in the dark interval, reconciled, they stay there trembling. And the song goes on, beautiful.
Anytime you see somebody keeping a secret, that's symptomatic that something's wrong with the society around them. That means there's discrimination or worse.
Glorious indeed is the world of God around us, but more glorious the world of God within us.
It’s terrible to lie in chains,_x000D_ To rot in dungeon deep,_x000D_ But it’s still worse, when you are free_x000D_ To sleep, and sleep, and sleep.
When the highwayman holds his gun to your head, you turn your valuables over to him. You 'consent' alright, but you do so because you cannot help yourself, because you are compelled by his gun. Are you not compelled to work for an employer? Your need compels you, just as the highwayman's gun.
Any idea of a United India could never have worked and in my judgment it would have led us to terrific disaster.
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