“When the chorus sing that the ‘name of the land will vanish’ and ‘Troy no longer exists’, they are singing for an audience for whom Troy’s name has survived.”
— P.E. Easterling on Euripides’s Trojan Woman, from ‘Form and Performance in Greek Tragedy’, The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy
“[Franz] Boaz introduced ideas into American life that shape how we think about the world to this day. Race is a construct, culture is relative, Western civilization is not inherently greater. History is not linear, and neither is human progress.”
Of course I have been writing as though society was an organism in which people were in harmony with each other, in which they cooperated with each other and in which they were not waging wars of aggression against each other and were not in conflict with each other. But in actual fact and in terms of human history such harmony has not been the case.
In human history, we see that society has been broken up into classes, into antagonistic ethnic and economic groups that struggle against each other for survival as each sees it. They enslave each other and make their living at the expense of other groups, special interest groups are formed, etc. So that in reality we have to look at our own situation, have to look at the situation that exists in the economic base in terms of the class struggle, also in terms of the ethnic struggles that have gone on.”
— Eldridge Cleaver, “Education and Revolution” The Black Scholar, November 1969
Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma in a people looks like culture.”
— Resmaa Menakem, ‘Notice the Rage; Notice the Silence’ – The On Being Project
The long and brutal history of the US trying to “kill the Indian and save the man”.
Toward the end of the 19th century, the US took thousands of Native American children and enrolled them in off-reservation boarding schools, stripping them of their cultures and languages. Yet decades later as the US phased out the schools, following years of indigenous activism, it found a new way to assimilate Native American children: promoting their adoption into white families. Watch the episode to find out how these two distinct eras in US history have had lasting impacts on Native American families.
Lisa Marie Blair 