February Food for Thought: On Fear, Race, Change and Borders

// February 1st, 2010 // Quote of the Week

On fear: Focus on believing in yourself. Everything else falls into place.

When you give people the power to set time-lines on your life, you lose.

Fear isn’t a sign of defeat necessarily. But having that fear dictate your actions or inaction is certainly defeat.

On race: Yay for Black History Month. Isn’t it so great that all the minorities get their own month here? Nothing like a month to make us feel equal.

We can give away months to minorities, but whitey still owns the calendar!

On change through new media: Most social change is the not-so-novel idea of one person fueled by the actions of many in various mediums.

On borders: Borders are human-made, geo-political constructions that should neither necessitate the deprivation of basic human rights nor cast people as outsiders. In our world, they function as a specific form of colonial domination that necessitates the delineation of an inside and outside, the marking and categorizing of certain bodies as alien and foreign for specific political purposes such as the “national security” project.

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5 Responses to “February Food for Thought: On Fear, Race, Change and Borders”

  1. neo says:

    My Pavlovian response to any mention of the word “Heritage” in the US was to salivate at the thought of Mexican food. I wonder why.. :)

  2. Prerna Lal says:

    Haha, because it is part of our heritage. Just not acknowledged as 'mainstream' without being given a month to celebrate

  3. guest says:

    "Whitey still owns the calendar" is not the type of remark I expected from one who espouses "a departure from thinking in binary terms of black/white".

  4. Prerna says:

    Hello anonymous guest. Apparently your expectations are inaccurate in light of your lack of understanding of context in addition to binaries. There is little doubt that whiteness and white privilege persist. Recognizing that little fact does not take us away from realizing the folly of thinking in black-white terms.

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