Book Notes, Fiction # The Color Purple By Alice Walker, 1982 ★★★★★ First read in April 2022 --- I’ve had the book for about two years now but couldn’t bring myself to go past the first page.  I tried, but I noped out of this story every single time - always taking the book out of the shelf, reading the first page, closing it and putting it back on the shelf.  Until finally I had a brief moment of bravery, took a deep breath, turned that first page and read through the whole thing in what felt like an instant.  ## Some things I was left with: - progress is a two-step-forwards-one-step-back kind of situation - a sense of community about being female in the world, anywhere, anytime  - a feel-good feeling that it may be possible for simple minds to transgress the prison of the idea of God and equivalents not only through education like I used to think, but also simply through human experience and meaningful human connection. ## Some thoughts I thought while reading it  History is opportunistic. The historical default is that people of one kind hate people of a different kind. And whatever kind has the circumstantial upper hand at a particular moment in history, will abuse the other kind. The rationalisation behind the abuse is always that the different kind are lesser humans.  -- One of the book’s most beautiful pleas is that all human life has equal value.  But I suspect achieving human rights for all will still not end abuse of one group by another. The reason I suspect this is because there seems to be no disagreement on the value of humanity. We all agree on the value of humanity - victims and abusers alike.  What we disagree on is whom we allocate the attribute of humanity to.  Blacks are murdering their white albino babies because they truly don’t see them as human. Whites are enslaving and torturing blacks because blacks are considered sub-human.  Once dehumanised, one is morally free to hurt the other. Why? Because what we all still seem to agree on is that humans are superior to non-humans.  So while we’re striving for human rights for all, we may be missing that achieving universal human rights will only ever attribute the protection of humanity to all human kinds known to a particular moment in history. Now, or 100 years from now. Or whenever that utopian dream is fulfilled.  What when a new group will emerge - a different kind of human, one so preposterous that there will be voices that rise to call it.. not human at all? Discrimination and abuse will return. Maybe taking the two steps forward to progress here is to destroy the idea of humanity as being intrinsically superior to non-humanity. Dehumanisation will then never be able to be used as moral grounds for abuse. Because being less human or being not human will not equal being inferior, as it does today and as it always has in the past.  ## Quotes “And some of the Olinka peoples believe life will just go on and on like this forever. And every million years or so something will happen to the earth and folks will change the way they look.  Folks might start growing two heads one of these days, for all us know, and then the folks with one head will send ‘em all someplace else.  They think the only way to stop making somebody the serpent is for everybody to accept everybody else as a child of God, or one mother’s children, no matter what they look like or how they act.” --- `Just carbon and water. Just atoms and the void.` ---