Race and Walls - Kendi and O'Donohue

What a powerful construct race is - powerful enough to consume us.
But for all that life-shaping power, race is a mirage, which doesn't
lessen its force.  We are what people see ourselves as,
whether what we [they] see exists or not.
What people see in themselves and others has meaning and
manifests itself in ideas and actions and policies....

Race is a mirage but one that we do well to *see*,
while never forgetting it is a mirage, never forgetting that
it's the painful light of racist power that makes the mirage.

Ibram X. Kendi

from: How To Be An Antiracist

A provocative and fascinating look
at how to end racism in the Western mind,
and to see that beyond race we are all fully
human.

~

Your complicity with other people's images and expectations
of you allows them to box you in completely.  It takes a long
time to recognize how some key people on your life's
journey exercise so much control over your mind, behavior,
and actions.  Through the image they project onto you
through the expectations they have of you, they claim you.

Most of this is subtle and works in the domain of the implicit
and unstated subtext; it is, of course, all the more powerful
for not being direct and obvious.  When you become conscious
of these powerful builders and their work of housing you in,
something within you refuses to comply; you begin to send
back the building materials.

Such projection and expectation is based on their fear and the
need to control.

John O'Donohue
from: Eternal Echoes

~

Photo from the internet