Freedom Is A Constant Struggle Quotes
"Trying and trying again. Never stopping. That is a victory in itself."
"The powerful have sent us a message: obey, and if you seek collective liberation, then you will be collectively punished."
"Progressive struggles are doomed to fail if they do not also attempt to develop a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism."
"The election itself was important, but what we have lacked is not the right president, but rather well-organized mass movements."
"Black feminism emerged as a theoretical and practical effort demonstrating that race, gender, and class are inseparable in the social worlds we inhabit."
"We internalize this notion of a place to put bad people. That’s precisely one of the reasons why we have to imagine the abolitionist movement as addressing those ideological and psychic issues as well."
"The abolitionist movement is about attempting to abolish racism, illiteracy, and homelessness, not just the physical prisons."
"We can’t be content with individual actions. We have to talk about systemic change."
"Community control of the police means establishing community bodies that have the power to actually control and dictate the actions of the police."
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
"I am sick and tired of being sick and tired."
"Why hasn’t anyone told us about the segregated highways leading from one settlement to another, about pedestrian segregation regulated by signs in Hebron—not entirely dissimilar from the signs associated with the Jim Crow South. Why hasn’t anyone told us this before?"
"If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail."
"All my life, I have been sick and tired. Now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired."
"But if one looks at the history of struggles against racism in the US, no change has ever happened simply because the president chose to move in a more progressive direction."
"Security, in this context, does not imply security for everyone, but rather, when one looks at the major clients of G4S Security (banks, governments, corporations etc.) it becomes evident that when G4S says it is 'Securing your World,' as the company slogan goes, it is referring to a world of exploitation, repression, occupation, and racism."
"But they’re shrewd, so we no longer see it in Ferguson because they have decided to make their militarization less visible, but even when we can’t see it, we have to make the point."
"I don’t think that there can be policing without racism. I don’t think that the criminal justice system can operate without racism. Which is to say that if we want to imagine the possibility of a society without racism, it has to be a society without prisons."
"The Emancipation Proclamation is perhaps the most misunderstood of the documents that have shaped American history."
"The only hope of winning the Civil War resided in creating the opportunity for Black people to fight for their own freedom."
"The general strike...transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader."
"Radical Reconstruction...remains the most radical era in the entire history of the United States of America."
"The Ku Klux Klan and the racial segregation...were produced not during slavery, but rather in an attempt to manage free Black people."
"Freedom is more expansive than civil rights."
"We want freedom. We want full employment. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black and oppressed communities."
"Institutions had to be produced that would incorporate former slaves into a new and developing democracy."
"Terrorism very much shaped the history of the United States of America."
"To create a world free of xenophobia and racism...where everyone learns how to respect the environment and all of the creatures, human and nonhuman alike, with whom we cohabit our worlds."
"The personal is political—everybody remembers that, right? The personal is political."
"The imprisoned population could not have grown to almost 2.5 million people in this country without our implicit assent."
"We have had to try to unlearn racism, and I am speaking not only about white people."
"The point I make is that if we had mounted a more powerful resistance in the 1980s and 1990s, we would not be confronting such a behemoth today."
"The political reproduces itself through the personal."
"There is a deep relationality that links struggles against institutions and struggles to reinvent our personal lives, and recraft ourselves."
"And let me say that I really love the new generations of young students and workers."
"Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
"We ourselves often do the work of the state in and through our interior lives."
"Everyone is familiar with the slogan 'The personal is political'—not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology."
"This retroactive criminalization of the late-twentieth-century Black liberation movements through targeting one of the women leaders at that time, who was so systematically pursued, is, I think, an attempt to deter people from engaging in radical political struggle today."
"Feminist approaches urge us to develop understandings of social relations, whose connections are often initially only intuited."
"Some of us have always insisted on making connections, in terms of prison work, between assaults on women in prison and the larger project of abolishing imprisonment."
"In this era of global capitalism, the corporations have learned how to access aspects of our lives that cause us to often express our innermost dreams in terms of capitalist commodities."
"I want to be little bit more specific about the importance of feminist theory and analysis."
"The greatest challenge facing us as we attempt to forge international solidarities and connections across national borders is an understanding of what feminists often call 'intersectionality.' Not so much intersectionality of identities, but intersectionality of struggles."
"When we think about the impact of these imaginative and innovative actions and these moments where people learned how to be together without the scaffolding of the state, when they learned to solve problems without succumbing to the impulse of calling the police, that should serve as a true inspiration for the work that we will do in the future to build these transnational solidarities."
"We cannot go on as usual. We cannot pivot the center. We cannot be moderate. We will have to be willing to stand up and say no with our combined spirits, our collective intellects, and our many bodies."