"And for me, too, it started the year I turned twelve. That was the year that I learned that being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready."
"We only know that crack filled the empty spaces for a lot of people whose lives have been emptied out."
"Prisoners are valuable. They not only work for pennies for the corporate brands our people love so much, but they also provide jobs for mostly poor white people, replacing the jobs lost in rural communities. Poor white people who are chosen to be guards. They run the motels in prison towns where families have to stay when they make 11-hour drives into rural corners of the state."
"Stock in private prisons and companies attached to prisons represents the largest growth industry in the American market as the millennium lurches toward its barbed-wire close."
"In almost every way, Mandela speaking in 1964 at the trial at Rivonia could have been one of our leaders speaking for Los Angeles in 1992, the year of the uprising."
"If we did not die, we could go to prison, where we could work for the State of California and corporate brands we could not afford to buy."
"But so ineffective were these laws [gang statutes] that between 1990 and 2010 in my city, Los Angeles, with the greatest number of injunctions in the state designed, they said, to stop gang activity, 10,000 young people were killed.
"Donna Hill, a simple, single Black woman with a heart that could carry a universe, becomes my first spirit guide, the first and most clear example I have as a young adult of what it means to receive a gift you can only properly show gratitude for by sharing it with others."
"I talk about the politics of personal responsibility, how it's mostly a lie meant to keep you from challenging real-world legislative decisions that chart people's paths, that undo people's lives."
"But now that race isn't written into the law, she says, look for the codes. Look for the coded language everywhere, she says. They rewrote the laws, but they didn't rewrite white supremacy. They kept that shit intact, she says."
"He loves me as is, which is a gift I wish for all of us to receive, the gift of being loved simply because of who you are, not in spite of it, not with condition, not loved in parts."
"How do you measure the loss of what a human being does not receive?"
"In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry, from jobs, housing and food bans, to school financial aid bans and the list goes on. You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn't mean you're not doing life."
"How is it possible that the only response we have for poor people who are mentally ill is criminalization? How does this align with the notion of a democratic or free society - to not take care of the least of these?"
"From my neighborhood in LA to the Bay Area to Brooklyn, Black and Brown people have been moved out as young white people build exciting new lives standing on the bones of ours. The drug war as ethnic cleansing."
"I do know that in my heart, the heart dedicated to Black liberation, I love people. Period. I love complicated, imperfect, beautiful people. People, I suppose, like me."
"We want to build a world in which undeveloped and unrefined emotional instincts - like possessiveness and jealousy - are minimized as much as humanly possible so that all eyes, hearts and spirits are not distracted from the goal. And the goal is freedom. The goal is to live beyond fear. The goal is to end the occupation of our bodies and souls by the agents of a larger American culture that demonstrates daily how we don't matter."
"Asset forfeiture allowed law enforcement to seize property simply if they said that they suspected someone of being involved with the drug trade."
"It's hard to be intimate with one person when you're being intimate with the world."
"We think about ways we could co-parent and partner without being married. I like how I feel in the space with JT, both liberated and connected."
"One by one each of us finds a chair - this is why I am barefoot, why we came in barefoot. And one by one almost all of us begin to speak:
If I die in police custody, know that they killed me.
If I die in police custody, show up at the jail, make noise, protest, tell my mother.
If I die in police custody, tell the entire world: I wanted to live."
"You have the power to shape-shift not only yourselves but the world of the world. You, each one, are endowed with gifts you don't even yet know, and you, each one, are what love and the possibility of a world in which our lives truly matter looks like."
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