[quotes] Inverno em Sokcho - Elisa Shua Dusapin 2016

  

[quotes] a terra dá, a terra quer - antonio bispo dos santos 2023

  

"Um rio nao deixa de ser um rio porque conflui com outro rio, ao contrario, ele passa a ser ele mesmo e outros rios, ele se fortalece. Quando a gente confluencia, a gente nao deixa de ser a gente, a gente passa a ser a gente e outra gente - a gente rende." 

"Pisar as fezes da galinha? Impossivel! Tem que ter uma ceramica bem lisinha para poder enxergar qualquer outra vida, qualquer outro vivente que estiver ali, para poder desinfetar e matar qualquer microrganismo. Matar ate o que nao se ve. Para andar descalco, e preciso desinfetar o chao: a ceramica foi criada porque os humanos nao podem pisar na terra. Porque a terra e o anseio original." 

"Percebi que o povo da cidade tinha relacoes de utilidade e importancia, mas nao tinha relacoes de necessidade. Para nos, a passoa que e importante nao e quase nada. E aquela pessoa que se acha otima, mas nao serve. O termo que tem valor para nos e necessario. Ha pessoas que sao necessarias e ha pessoas que sao importantes. As pessoas que sao importantes acham que as outras pessoas existem para servi-las. As pessoas necessarias sao diferentes, sao pessoas que fazem falta. Pessoas que precisam estar presentes, de quem se vai atras." 

"Quando viajo, nao dou dinheiro para hotel e, ao inves de ir ao shopping, vou a feira, porque na feira vejo pessoas que se parecem comigo, que transpiram, que sao organicas. As pessoas do shopping nao transpiram, no shopping nao ha cheiro de suor, so ha cheiros sinteticos, cheiros de produtos abstratos." 

"Encuanto a sociedade se faz com os iguais, a comunidade se faz com or diversos. Nos somos os diversais, os cosmologicos, os naturais, os organicos." 

"Os humanistas nao querem globalizar no sentido diversal, mas no sentido de unificar, de transformar tudo em um. Quando falam de individuo, falam de unicidade. Nos, quando falamos de individuo, estamos falando de unidade, estamos dizendo 'um', mas esse 'um' e parte do todo, do universo. Se para os humanistas o 'um' e o universo, para nos so ha 'um' porque ha mais de um." 

"Quando nao ha circularidade, voce vai ter que voltar por onde voce foi. Na transfluencia nao ha volta, porque ela e circular. Ao mesmo tempo que algo vai, fica; ao mesmo tempo que fica, vai - sem desconectar." 

"Trouxemos a palavra contracolonialismo para enfraquecer o colonialismo. Ja que o referencial de um extremo e o outro, tomamos o proprio colonialismo. Criamos um antidoto: estamos tirando o veneno do colonialismo para transforma-lo em antidoto contra ele proprio." 

"Ao contrario do que se pensa, nao se trata de uma atividade cansativa, cozinhar so e cansativo quando alguem conzinha sozinho para servir a todos. Num clima de festa, conzinhar nao e cansativo." 

"Dizem tambem que existem milicias e crime organizado nas favelas e nos quilombos. O que nos dizemos e que existe milicia nos Alphavilles, a diferenca e que a milicia dos Alphavilles e legalizada e institucionalizada, e tem muito mais armas do que a milicia de favela. O que se chama de seguranca privada e uma milicia." 

"E no bar de ponta de rua que que fazemos esse tipo de comparacao, e ali que rimos quando passa um carro todo poderoso e fecha os vidros com medo: 'Coitado, alem de preso no Alphaville, ainda e preso quando esta na rua e ve a gente!". Somos as pessoas que prendem sem preciar de algema ou chave, so com a aparencia." 

"Por que o povo da humanidade precisa de restaurante? Porque eles tem medo de receber pessoas em suas casas, eles tem medo de gente! Os humanos tem medo de si. Isso e cosmofobia." 

"As universidades sao fabricas de transformar os saberes em mercadorias e a agricultura quilombola nao e mercadoria. Mas os saberes considerados validos sao aqueles que a universidade converte em mercadoria." 

"Ora, isso que se compra no supermercado com o selo de 'organico' e um produto, as vezes sem veneno, mas nao e algo organico. Nao e produzido pelo saber organico, nao e voltado para a vida. Se um quilo de carne organica e muito caro, o pobre nao pode comprar; e se o pobre nao pode comer, nao e organico. Organico e aquilo que todas as vidas potem acessar. O que as vidas nao podem acessar nao e o organico, e mercadoria - com ou sem veneno."  

[quotes] Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) - Dean Spade 2020

  

"Mutual aid projects work to meet survival needs and build shared understanding about why people do not have what they need." 

"Getting support through a mutual aid project that has a political analysis of the conditions that produced your crisis also helps to break stigma, shame, and isolation." 

"By participating in groups in new ways and practicing new ways of being together, we are both building the world we want and becoming the kind of people who could live in such a world together." 

"We are encouraged to be mostly numbed-out consumers, but ones who perhaps volunteer at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving, post videos about animal rights on our social media accounts, or wear a T-shirt with a feminist slogan now and again." 

"Activism and mutual aid shouldn't feel like volunteering or like a hobby - it should feel like living in alignment with our hopes for the world and with our passions. It should enliven us." 

"They encourage reforms premised on the assumption that the systems we seek to dismantle are fundamentally fair and fixable. We have to refuse to limit our visions to the concessions they want to give - what we want is a radically different world that eliminates the systems that put our lives under their control."  

"Because of how capitalism controls the means for getting by - food, health, housing, communications, transportation - and how dependent we are on systems we do not control, it can be hard to imagine that we could survive another way. But for most of human history, we did, and mutual aid projects let us relearn that it's possible and emancipatory." 

"MADR's slogan is 'No Masters, No Flakes,' and it's a great summary of key principles for collective mutual aid work. This dual focus on rejecting hierarchies inside the organization and committing to build accountability according to shared values asks participants to keep showing up and working together not because a boss is making you, but because you want to." 

"Consensus decision-making is based on the idea that everyone should have a say in decisions that affect them." 

"For consensus to work well, people need a common purpose; some degree of trust in each other; and understanding of the consensus process; a willingness to put the best interests of the group at the center (which does not mean people let themselves be harmed 'for the good of the group,' but may mean being okay not always getting their way); a willingness to spend time preparing and discussing proposals; and skillful facilitation and agenda preparation." 

"When someone shows up to a mutual aid group for the first time, full of urgency about something they care about, and they do not understand why things are being done the way they are, or do not understand how things are being done, and do not have a way to share their opinions and influence what is happening, they are likely to leave. People come to contribute, but they stay because they feel needed, included, and a part of something." 

"In our culture, we get a lot of practice either going along with bossy people or trying to be the boss. It's time to learn something different." 

"Decision-making works better if, rather than anyone seeing it as 'my proposal,' we can see it as the group's proposal. That way we are less likely to become rigidly attached to one outcome." 

"Most of us avoid conflict either by submitting to others' wills and trying to numb out the impact on us, or by trying to dominate others to get our way and being numb to the impact on others." 

 "If we do work we care deeply about with other people, we will experience conflict because the stakes of the work feel very high to us, and that conflict is likely to bring up wounds and reactions from earlier in our lives." 

"Sometimes we are so used to feeling excluded that we tune into that familiar feeling quickly and easily, unconsciously looking for evidence that we are different or are being slighted or left out." 

"We live in a society based on disposability. When we feel bad, we often automatically decide that either we are bad or another person is bad... If we want to build a different way of being together in groups, we have to look closely at the feelings and behaviors that generate the desire to throw people away."  

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy - Becky Chambers 2022

  

"Nobody should be barred from necessities or comforts just because they don't have the right number next to their name."

"All ingredients on Panga had to first exist on Panga. Everything is natural in origin, but if you turn it into something that nature can no longer recycle, then you've removed it from that realm entirely. It no longer has a part to play. Just like me. I'm an observer, not a participant." 

"I'm here to meet humanity, and these people you've described are just as much a part of it as you are. I wouldn't be doing a very good job of pursuing my quest if I only welcomed the parts that were fun." 

"But that's exactly why I come back after going elsewhere. Me and mine believe the further you distance yourself from the realities of what it means to be an animal in this world, the more you risk severing your connection to it." 

"It was always a strange thing, coming home. Coming home meant that you had, at one point, left it and, in doing so, irreversibly changed. How odd, then, to be able to return to a place that would always be anchored in your notion of the past. How could this place still be there, if the you that once lived there no longer existed?" 

A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers 2021

 

"We don't have to fall into the same category to be of equal value." 

"Most of my kind have a focus - not as sharply focused as Two Foxes or Back Marbled Rockfrog, necessarily, but they have an area of expertise, at least. Whereas I... I like everything."

"'Everybody thinks they're the exception to the rule, and that's exactly where the trouble starts. One person can do a lot of damage.' 'Every living thing causes damage to others, Sibling Dex. You'd all starve otherwise. Have you ever watched a bull elk mow its way through a bitebulb thicket?'"

"How could we continue to be students of the world if we don't emulate its most intrinsic cycle? If the originals had simply fixed themselves, they'd be behaving in opposition to the very thing they desperately sough to understand. The thing we're still trying to understand."

"'So the paradox is that the ecosystem as a whole needs its participants to act with restraint in order to avoid collapse, but the participants themselves have no inbuilt mechanism to encourage such behavior.' 'Other than fear.' 'Other than fear, which is a feeling you want to avoid or stop at all costs.' The hardware in Mosscap's head produced a steady hum. 'Yes, that's a mess, isn't it?'"

"'Find the strength to do both,' Mosscap said, quoting the phrase painted on the wagon. 'Exactly,' Dex said. 'But what's both?' Dex recited: 'Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of the mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what make us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either.'" 

"You're an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You're an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don't know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don't need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do."  

In the Absence of the Ordinary - Francis Weller 2025

  

"The skill of grieving well enables us to become current - to live in the present moment and be available to the electricity of life. We gradually turn our attention to what is here, now, and pay less attention to our need to repair history. We remember we are more verb than noun, more a jumpy rhythm, a wild song, a fluid leap than a fixed thing in space."

"In his book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, O'Donohue writes, 'What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach... When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us."

"It is not about resolving our issues or repairing the past but becoming more spacious and capable of holding all that psyche and life brings to us."

"We need to hold, contain, and cook the material before sharing it with the world. It must be allowed o go through its own process of distillation prior to being revealed to questioning eyes. The value of restraint acknowledges this truth and creates a space where something can take shape according to its nature." 

"Let us come to see the value of restraint, of creating space through the practice of not doing. It may be there that we find ourselves escorted into the chamber of what it is the soul truly longs for." 

"Our senses and minds were synchronized to streams and night skies, to times around the fire, to the long, patient wait of the hunger, to the listening to stories told by elders. We moved slowly and drank in the entire spectrum of life through our bodies. We need to take up an apprenticeship with slowness and remember this ancient mode of being." 

"Slow down, uncenter and forget about yourself for a moment, let the world find you, love what is nearby, share your grief with others, say thank you, learn the stories from where you live and from where your ancestors came, be a wee bit wild in your imagination, and come home."

"In the absence of the ordinary, it falls to us to kindle bonds of kinship with all that is near to us. We are at a threshold for our world. In the days to come, everything we do will be significant. Never doubt that each of us is essential to the welfare of the commons. Everyone is a vector. Choose what you spread. It all tuns on affection." 

 

[quotes] The Emperor of Gladness - Ocean Vuong 2025

  

"You lose the dead as the earth takes them, but the living you still have a say in. And so he said it. And so he lied." 

"There was so little to hide from each other by then, their bodies finally scraped clean with each other's gazes."

"If you can be nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that's enough. Look at my girl, all that talent and for what, just to drown in Bud Light? People don't know what's enough, Labas. That's their problem. They think they suffer, but they're really just bored. They don't eat enough carrots." 

"What you see might not always be what you feel. And what you feel may no longer be real. Somewhere inside him the boy believed this law was what turned the planet on its axis."  

[quotes] Conflict Is Not Abuse - Sarah Schulman 2019

 

"At the center of my vision is the recognition that above all, it is the community surrounding a Conflict that is the source of its resolution. The community holds the crucial responsibility to resit overreaction to difference, and to offer alternatives of understanding and complexity. We have to help each other illuminate and counter the role of overstating harm instead of using it to justify cruelty."

"The values required for social repair are the same values required for personal repair." 

"It is not that I was lying, bu that I was defended. I blocked access to my own real feelings. I did this to defend a story about myself that I felt safe maintaining, even if it wasn't true. But sometimes the other person saw the truth that I was unable to access or be accountable for. Part of peace-making is acknowledging that we can't know everything about ourselves, and sometimes we reveal things to others that we are not ready to accept."

"There is something in the person who hides behind email that wants these offenses to be true. They want to feel victimized. Then they don't have to look at themselves critically or think about the other person with complexity. There is no guilt or responsibility if one is an email victim."

 "While unrecovered trauma is so often a prison of inflexibility, some people do have choices about how to respond. And someone else might make that shift possible by daring to imagine what to us may feel unimaginable. Which can be love."

"At any conflicted moment that is available to interpret one's self as somehow transgressed, there is often the option of not seeing it that way. Or of asking the other person what they mean."

"Being in a negative moment with another person can be destabilizing, hurtful, and stressful, especially if a person's self-concept requires them to think of themselves as perfect. But it is not, by definition, Abuse. It could be Abuse, if one has power over another, but if not, it's a Conflict. And being in a Conflict is a position that is filled with responsibility and opportunity." 

"People who describe themselves as "Abused" when they are actually in Conflict are not lying; they usually don't know the difference." 

"A shallow relationship with a friend, relative, co-worker, or advocate means that they will not take the time to ask the meaningful questions and to help the person involved overcome shame, anger, and disappointment so they can get to a complex truth about their own participation and how to achieve repair."

"This placement of the authority to 'stop violence' into the hands of the police produces a crisis of meaning. The police are often the source of violence, especially in the lives of women, people of color, trans women, sex workers, and the poor. And the police enforce the laws of the United States of America, which is one of the greatest sources of violence in the world... The law is designed to protect the state, not the people who are victimized by the state. So while police intervention can importantly separate violent adults from their victims or each other after violence has begun, this job of 'stopping violence' has shifted from stopping the causes of violence to reacting punitively to the expressions of those unaddressed causes." 

"Once we stop being determined to produce a victim and are instead focused on learning the truth of what actually happened, we become willing to accept the discomfort of recognizing two people as being Conflicted and embrace a more humane and acknowledging vision of social relationships."

"People have the right to change partners, but there are many kinds of available paths to creating change. Taking responsibility, recognizing the other person's anguish, allowing for transitional indulgences, going through a process with third parties even if uncomfortable, can dissipate pain."

"Instead of encouraging more open communication between lovers, the government is imposing itself as a substitute for learning how to problem-solve." 

"This is what Supremacy Ideology does: it provides the empowered with delusions of superiority, as the ideology itself masquerades as reality. This is why some people feel righteous in calling the police instead of facing their own anxieties, and why others reinforce them in this terrible decision." 

"Silence can itself be an escalation. Little children give their parents "the silent treatment" because they don't know how to negotiate: how to listen, to respond in a way that is transformed by having listened, to change in order to meet the other."

"We all have an ideal imagined self and a real self, and there is always a gap between the two. I've never met a person who was exempt from this. The process of moving forward in life requires, I guess, constant adjustment on both sides. We each come closer to a more mature understanding of who we really are, some kind of acceptance, while at the same time working to change the things we can in order to get closer to our desired self. In this way, the gap narrows from both sides: acceptance, and change."

"Privacy, or rather invasion of, is when the government collects data on you without your consent. Shame, to me, is hiding information that reveals common human experiences, contradictions, and mistakes. Sometimes this is imposed from the outside through stigma."

"In fact, both studies found that people who come from guilt very much want to negotiate, are able to apologize and admit fault, can make concessions, and are invested in positive resolution. People coming from shame, on the other hand, direct anger, aggression, and blame towards the other party."  

 "As Sarah Ahmed says, learning from Audre Lorde: while actually dealing with the substance of Conflict may initially feel more upsetting than repressing it, the response to high levels of distress should sometimes be to create even higher levels of distress. In this way, internal and external domination systems are revealed, and this ultimately dismantled." 

"There is narcissism to Supremacy, but there is also a narcissism to Trauma, when a person cannot see how others are being affected. Although the triggered person may be made narcissistic and self-involved by the enormity of their pain, bot parties are in fact equally important. And it is the job of the surrounding communities to insist on this." 

"Using the word 'transference,' she implied an attachment of an emotion to people who are not the source of that emotion. In this way, we externalize internal conflict."

"All of these systems recommend the same tactic: delay. And in order o delay, they all agree, one needs to be in community: a relationship, friendship circle, family, identity group, nation, or people who encourage us to be self-critical and look for alternatives to blame, punishment, and attack. We need to be in groups that are willing to be uncomfortable and take the time to fully talk through the order of events, take all parties into account, and facilitate repair." 

"His friends have to parent him as well as his actual parents, because that is where real values are established, in the conflict between what our families tell us and the reality of the world."

"Do what feels right is unfortunately considered the individual's best guide to ethical action. But this can be a capitulation to the controls of impulsivity, rooted in trauma and egged on by bad friends and negative family relationships. There is a gross distortion in this ideology as an excuse to do what you want. Pretending that what is comfortable and easiest is inherently what is right is a tragic self-deception." 

"Finally, ultimately, when groups bond over shunning or hurting or blaming another person, it is the state's power that is enhanced. Because the state doesn't want to understand causes, because the state doesn't want things to get better, it doesn't want people to understand each other. State apparatuses are there to maintain the power of those in control and punish those who contest that power; that is what bad families do, and that is what bad friends do."

[quotes] Women, Race, and Class - Angela Davis 1981

 

The Legacy of Slavery: Standards for a New Womanhood 

"The slavery system defined Black people as chattel. Since women, no less than men, were viewed as profitable labor-units, they might as well have been genderless as far as the slaveholders were concerned. In the words of one scholar, 'the slave woman was first a full-time worker for her owner, and only incidentally a wife, mother and homemaker.'"

"Expediency governed the slaveholders' posture toward female slaves: when it was profitable to exploit them as if they were men, they were regarded, in effect, as genderless, but when they could be exploited, punished and repressed in ways suited only for women, they were locked into their exclusively female roles." 

"Within the confines of their family and community life, therefore, Black people managed to accomplish a magnificent feat. They transformed that negative equality which emanated from the equal oppression they suffered as slaves into a positive quality: the egalitarianism characterizing their social relations." 

"Black women were equal to their men in the oppression they suffered; they were their men's social equals within the slave community; and they resisted slavery with  passion equal to their men's. This was one of the greatest ironies of the slave system, for in subjecting women to the most ruthless exploitation conceivable, exploitation which knew no sex distinctions, the groundwork was created not only for Black women to assert their equality through their social relations, but also to express it through their acts of resistance." 

The Anti-Slavery Movement and the Birth of Women's Rights

"When manufacturing moved out of the home and into the factory, the ideology of womanhood began to raise the wife and mother as ideals. As workers, women had at least enjoyed economic equality, but as wives, they were destined to become appendages to their men, servants to their husbands. As mothers, they would be defined as passive vehicles for the replenishment of human life. The situation of the white housewife was full of contradictions. There was bound to be resistance." 

"The anti-slavery movement offered women of the middle class the opportunity to prove their worth according to standards that were not tied to their role as wives and mothers. In this sense, the abolitionist campaign was a home where they could be valued for their concrete works."

"They discovered that sexism, which seemed unalterable inside their marriages, could be questioned and fought in the arena of political struggle. Yes, white women would be called upon to defend fiercely their rights as women in order to fight for the emancipation of Black people." 

"But once the male supremacist attacks against them were unleashed, they realized that unless they defended themselves as women - and the rights of women in general - they would be forever barred from the campaign to free the slaves." 

Class and Race in the Early Women's Rights Campaign

"Frederick Douglass was also responsible for officially introducing the issue of women's rights to the Black Liberation movement, where it was enthusiastically welcomed."

"These women - unlike their predecessors, whose families owned land - had nothing to rely upon but their labor power. When they resisted, they were fighting for their right to survive."

"Even the most radical white abolitionists, basing their opposition to slavery on moral and humanitarian grounds, failed to understand that the rapidly developing capitalism of the North was also an oppressive system. They viewed slavery as a detestable and inhuman institution, an archaic transgression to justice. But they did not recognize that the white worker in the North, his or her status as 'free' laborer notwithstanding, was no different from the enslaved 'worker' in the South: both were victims of economic exploitation." 

Racism in the Woman Suffrage Movement

"The assumption that emancipation had rendered the former slaves equal to white women - both groups equally requiring the vote for the completion of their social equality - ignored the utter precariousness of Black people's newly won 'freedom' during the post-Civil War era. While the chains of slavery had been broken, Black people still suffered the pain of economic deprivation and they faced the terrorist violence of racist mobs in a form whose intensity was unmatched even by slavery." 

"In light of widespread violence and terror suffered by Black people in the South, Frederick Dougless' insistence that Black people's need for electoral power was more urgent than that of middle-class white women was logical and compelling. The former slave population was still locked in a struggle to defend their lives - and in Douglass' eyes, only the ballot could ensure their victory." 

"The women's rights leaders of the post-Civil War era tended to view the vote as an end in itself. Already in 1866, it seemed that whoever furthered the cause of woman suffrage, however racist their motives, was a worthwhile recruit for the women's campaign."

The Meaning of Emancipation According to Black Women 

"Men and women alike were arrested and imprisoned at the slightest pretext - in order to be leased out by the authorities as convict laborers. Whereas the slaveholders had recognized limits to the cruelty with which they exploited their 'valuable' human property, no such cautions were necessary for the postwar planters who rented Black convicts for relatively short terms." 89

"As a result, both employers and state authorities acquired a compelling economic interest in increasing the prison population." 89

"This perversion of the criminal justice system was oppressive to the ex-slave population as a whole. But the women were especially susceptible to the brutal assaults of the judicial system. The sexual abuse they had routinely suffered during the era of slavery was not arrested by the advent of emancipation." 

"White women - feminists included - have revealed a historical reluctance to acknowledge the struggles of household workers." 

"The feminist activist was perpetrating the very oppression she protested. Yet her contradictory behavior and her inordinate insensitivity are not without explanation, for people who work as servants are generally viewed as less than human beings. Inherent in the dynamic of the master-servant (or mistress-maid) relationship, said the philosopher Hegel, is the constant striving to annihilate the consciousness of the servant."

Education and Liberation: Black Women's Perspective 

"'knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.'" 100

Women Suffrage at the Turn of the Century: The Rising Influence of Racism

"This conversation between Ida B. Wells and Susan B. Anthony rook place in 1894. Anthony's self-avowed capitulation to racism 'on the ground of expediency' characterized her public stance on this issue until she resigned in 1900 from the presidency of the National American Woman Suffrage Association." 

"The same forces that sought to subjugate the peoples of these countries were responsible for the worsening plight of Black people and the entire US working class. Racism nourished those imperialist ventures and was likewise conditioned by imperialism's strategies and apologetics."

"Had Anthony seriously reflected on the findings of her friend Ida B. Wells, she might have realized that a noncommittal stand on racism implied that lynchings and mass murders by the thousands could be considered a neutral issue." 119

"For years and years, leading suffragists had justified the Association's indifference to the cause of racial equality by invoking the catch-all argument of expediency. Now woman suffrage was represented as the most expedient means to achieve racial supremacy." 

Black Women and the Club Movement 

"Not nearly as many Black women were confronted with the domestic void which plagued their white middle-class sisters." 

Working Women, Black Women and the History of the Suffrage Movement

"Anthony's staunchly feminist position was also a staunch reflection of bourgeois ideology. And it was probably because of the ideology's blinding powers that she failed to realize that working-class women and Black women alike were fundamentally linked to their men by the class exploitation and racist oppression which did not discriminate between the sexes." 142

Communist Women

"Lucy Parsons argued that racism and sexism were overshadowed by the capitalists' overall exploitation of the working class. Since they were victims of capitalist exploitation, said Parsons, Black people and women, no less than white people and men, should devote all their energies to the class struggle... Sex and race, according to Lucy Parsons' theory, were facts of existence manipulated by employers who sought to justify their greater exploitation of women and people of color." 153

Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist

"Slavery relied as much on routine sexual abuse as it relied on the whip and the lash." 175

"It was the unwritten policy of the US Military Command to systematically encourage rape, since it was an extremely effective weapon of mass terrorism." 

"The reliance on rape as an instrument of white-supremacist terror predates by several centuries the institution of lynching. During slavery, the lynching of Black people did not occur extensively - for the simple reason that slaveowners were reluctant to destroy their valuable property. Flogging yes, but lynching, no. Together with flogging, rape was a terribly efficient method of keeping Black women and men alike in check. It was a routine arm of repression." 183

"... for the rape charge turned out to be the most powerful of several attempts to justify the lynching of Black people. The institution of lynching, in turn, complemented by the continued rape of Black women, became an essential ingredient of the postwar strategy of racist terror." 

"Lynchings were represented as a necessary measure to prevent Black supremacy over white people - in other words, to reaffirm white supremacy."

"In a society where male supremacy was all-pervasive, men who were motivated by their duty to defend their women could be excused of any excess they might commit. That their motive was sublime was ample justification for the resulting barbarities." 187

"It seems, in fact, that men of the capitalist class and their middle-class partners are immune to prosecution because they commit their sexual assaults with the same unchallenged authority that legitimizes their daily assaults on the labor and dignity of working people."

Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights

"Black women have been aborting themselves since the earliest days of slavery. Many slave women refused to bring children into a world of interminable forced labor, where chains and floggings and sexual abuse for women were the everyday condition of life."204

"Their assumption reflected the tendency to blur the distinction between abortion rights and the general advocacy of abortions. The campaign often failed to provide a voice for women who wanted the right to legal abortions while deploring the social conditions that prohibited them from bearing more children." 

"More and more, it was assumed within birth control circles that poor women, Black and immigrant alike, had a 'moral obligation to restrict the size of their families.' What was demanded as a 'right' for the privilege came to be interpreted as a 'duty' for the poor." 210

"By 1932 the Eugenics Society could boast that at least twenty-six states had passed compulsory sterilization laws and that thousands of 'unfit' persons had already been surgically prevented from reproducing."

60-61, 77-83, 88-90, 96-97, 183-187, 205-210

Abolish Rent - Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis 2024

  

"The frame of 'housing crisis' trains our attention away from the fundamental power imbalance between landlords and tenants. It suggests that to solve the crisis, we should focus on the people who design housing, who build housing, who profit from housing, not the people who live in it. It encourages us to think about abstract, fungible 'housing units' and not about power, or about people and the constraints that shape their lives." 

"'All housing is public housing,' as David Madden and Peter Marcuse put it. Public investment is a precondition for private profit. Even what we think of as privately owned housing relies on vast public infrastructure to exist. That physical infrastructure includes the pipes that deliver water, the sewers that carry out waste, the sidewalks, roads, and transportation systems that connect our housing to our neighborhoods and our neighborhoods to each other. Public infrastructure also means legal and financial systems, from the contracts that govern leases, to the regulations that dictate everything from what counts as a bedroom to the terms of financing loans. The private housing market could not exist without the support of the state."

"Theirs is a view of tenant power as a by-product of market forces: like a low unemployment rate, which gives workers more leverage, incentivizing bosses to improve conditions and raise pay, a higher vacancy rate would give tenants more choice, motivating landlords to make repairs and ease rent increases. But just as tight labor market has never eliminated deadly jobs or poverty wages, a slack housing market will not eradicate slum housing or rent gouging. Indeed, it was organized labor unions that won wage floors, weekends, and safety regulations; no basic worker protection or benefit has been handed over as a gift from 'job creators.'"

"To protect their right to profit from housing, the industry consistently framed their attacks as a defense against communism. Robert Gerholz, president of the National Home Builders, threatened that public housing would allow the US to 'be precipitated into a socialist state.'"

"As Hoyt once put it, 'Communism can never win in a nation of homeowners.' By blocking a federal guarantee to a dignified home, the real estate industry forced most tenants to turn to the private market." 

"By the eighties, shaped in turns by inflation, tax revolt, racism, and the red scare, Republicans had invented the housing programs that make up the overwhelming bulk of the government response to the housing question today, in which support for tenants ends up benefiting landlords and real estate developers... Rather than challenge the power of landlords and developers to extract rents, these programs hand over our tax dollars to shore up private profits."

"The decline of public housing was timed with the expansion of another institution of publicly funded housing for the poor: prisons - public housing as public warehousing." 

"Like the horticultural metaphor of 'urban blight' that figures dilapidation as disease, the theory smears the quality of tenants' neighborhoods into the character of tenants themselves. It suggests that buildings in poor condition are not evidence of historical segregation and disinvestment - the decisions of landowners and governments - but evidence of residents' criminality." 

"The role of municipal governance continued to shift from providing services to existing residents to growing their economies and expanding their tax bases. Municipalities perform that role by courting new, richer residents as well as real estate speculators." 

"Who should we look to for help to dismantle the real estate regime? What levers do we have? What threat do we pose? 'What can we do today so that we can do tomorrow what we cannot do today?'"

"Putting a face and a name on the landlord turned the struggle against an impersonal process of gentrification into a struggle against a would-be evictor, who could no longer hide from personal responsibility for - and personal benefit from - the tenants' removal." 

"They learned about the warranty of habitability, implied in most every state and enshrined in California, which ties a tenants' obligation to pay rent to a property's livability: an apartment free of pests and structural issues, heat that heats, lights that light, drains that drain. Withholding rent is often legally protected if basic living standards are not met." 

"This is clear from the Mariachi's collective action: Those who couldn't pay and those who could decided to join together, organizing to withhold a majority of the rent roll for the building. The association turned withholding rent into a ritual, turning over their rent checks or money orders to be stored by the union each month." 

"Landlord stakeholders claim their property taxes are their contributions to the public good, but it is we who pay our landlords' property taxes." 

"A tenants union treats tenants as experts in their own experience and as agents of the changes we need. Who builds a tenants union? We do. Who is it for? Us. A union allows tenants to claim collective control of our housing and our lives." 

"By reclaiming the common space of our buildings and our blocks, we assert ourselves as the stewards of the places where we live. We educate ourselves, acting our way into thinking and archiving past tactics to build an arsenal for the future." 

"Enacting the principle of small-d democracy - people's self-governance - the tenants union is an instrument to produce small-c communism - collective control over our housing, our land, and our lives." 

"The union builds community to overcome this sense of disempowerment, to testify to our ongoing presence in our neighborhoods, to bolster our sense of control over our lives. When we act together in solidarity, we solidify the bonds gentrification breaks." 

"So many systems protect landlords from having to encounter the consequences of their actions, from the LLCs that anonymize their identities to the physical distance that separates their homes from ours." 

"And, as we know from living in broken-down apartments in cities with habitability laws on the books, what laws we win are only as good as their enforcement." 

"Similarly, when we reclaim shared spaces - hold association meetings in our lobbies, grow plants in our backyards, repair our sidewalks, clean our alleys, block traffic to host a union party on our street - we occupy our buildings, our neighborhoods, and the city." 

"How do you resolve the tension between the emergency we are living through and the fact that the only tools we have to work with - organizing and collective action - take so much time?... The union is what makes it possible to continue in the face of all the conditions that made it seem like the rational thing to do would be to give up." 

"Aligned with property values rather than human rights, city agencies conspired against residents of Echo Park Lake by denying or removing services. As public-records requests revealed, Chief Park Ranger Joe Losorelli had helped deny the park access to a hygiene trailer with showers, lest it become 'another Occupy LA.'"

"Housing without autonomy is internment."

"During an attempt at mediation, the landlord told the city attorney's office that he'd drop his tenants' evictions provided they stop their events. He said the tenants association's movie nights, chapter meetings, and food distribution were as threatening to him as eviction notices. Those communal gatherings are not outwardly aggressive actions, but, in a way, he is right: taking away his ability to turn their neighbors against them, building support for emergency response, those actions grow the power of tenants."