[quotes] Carceral Capitalism - Jackie Wang 2018

 

"Prisons and law enforcement may actually grow when the ideology of small government is hegemonic because the maintenance of law and order is considered the proper (morally authorized) domain of government. For Bernard E. Harcourt, neoliberal penality is rooted in 'the assumption of government legitimacy and competence in the penal arena and, on the other hand, the presumption that the government should not play a role elsewhere.'"

"Thus, as growth in the 'real' economy remains low, in our perverted debt economy, falsely categorizing borrowers as delinquent has become a financial opportunity in itself."

"All of this to say that a vast number of humans - whether they are laborers or soldiers - may become superfluous, though they my still be needed (for now at least) as users and consumers."

"This antagonistic relationship to production also redefines how the People's War is waged: rather than seizing the means of production, Jackson emphasized the destruction of the protective and productive forces."

"Law itself is a construction designed specifically to manage 'poor, desperate people like me.'"

"Will these credit instruments and the 'discipline of the free market' reduce our lives to the acquisition of 'marketable skills' and make it impossible to explore, wander, create, invent, learn (as opposed to 'acquiring skills'), relax, form non-instrumentalized social bonds, loaf, and daydream? Without a revolution or a social movement to overturn or counter the direction of the debt economy and techno-capitalism, we might be catapulted into a future where our lives are disciplined and determined by our dependency on credit."

"But what exactly is primitive accumulation? It entails the creation of a labor market and a system of private property achieved through the violent process of dispossessing people of their land and ways of life so that they can be converted into workers for capitalists. In order to turn peasants, small craftsmen, and others into workers who have nothing to sell but their labor power, these people must first be alienated from their means of subsistence."

"1) Capitalism is inherently expansionary, as it seeks to realize an ever-increasing amount of surplus value; 2) There is no reason why surplus value need be realized within the formal capitalist sphere when realization can be secured through violence, state force, colonization, militarism, war, the use of international credit to promote the interests of the hegemonies, the expropriation of indigenous land, predatory tariffs and taxes, hyper-exploitation, and the pilfering of the public purse."

"Harvey agrees with Luxemburg's claim that capitalism has a dual character: one sphere is governed by freedom of contract and the rule of law while the other is dominated by political violence and looting carried out by hegemonic capitalist nations. The looting component of the accumulation process is often carried out through the international credit system, which Harvey notes is the linchpin of late capitalism."

"To accept risk scores as an index of personal competency is to embrace a liberal politics of personal agency, where those who work hard to maintain good credit get what they deserve."

"The idea that people have a moral obligation to make good on their promise to pay their debts is partly tied to the idea that freedom means personally bearing the risks of your actions and decisions."

"A generation - financiers, abolitionists, actuaries, jurists, preachers, legislators, corporate executives, philosophers, social scientists - developed a vision of freedom that linked the liberal ideal of self-ownership to the personal assumption of 'risk.'" - Freaks of Fortune, Jonathan Levy

"the credit system is legitimized by the moral framework that shapes our understanding of debt - whereby the creditor is framed as benevolent while the struggling debtors are viewed as lazy or irresponsible for defaulting on their loans. However, as lending practices become more predatory, this moral framework is at risk of unraveling."

"The financialization of municipalities, the loss of key tax revenue streams, deindustrialization, and capital flight are the causes of the fiscal crisis - not reckless public spending. The situation has led to the development of socially deleterious methods of revenue extraction that target vulnerable populations, particularly poor black Americans."

"However, I want to emphasize that the state is no ordinary borrower; it is a borrower endowed with the legal power to loot the public to pay back its creditors."

"... a municipality's financial standing (or its credit-worthiness) is partly tied to its ability to remain solvent by using the police power and court system to extract revenue from citizens."

"The kapitalistate framework also posits that two primary functions of the state in a capitalist society are to facilitate the accumulation process and to legitimize capitalism."

"Foucault asserts that biopolitical forms of power target the 'aleatory,' unpredictable, and potentially destabilizing elements of a population for the sake of keeping the whole population in balance."

"Foucault puts it bluntly when he says, 'In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable... Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State.'" - Society Must be Defended

"It's as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: 'Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.' That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see every day - the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state."

"For Gilmore, the problem 'is not to figure out how to determine or prove the innocence of certain individuals or certain classes of people, but to attack the general system through which criminalization proceeds.'"

"The media construction of urban ghettos and prisons as 'alternate universes' marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places removed from the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are another example of 'void' zones that white people can only access through the fantasy of media representations. Whatever happens in these zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register in the white imaginary. In the instance that an 'injustice' does not register, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms."

"Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize."

"Surviving gendered violence does not make the survivor incapable of perpetuating other forms of violence... That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors, but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situation closely, and remaining cognizant of the multiple power struggles at play in different conflicts."

"I see this rejection of collective forms of organizing - and the unwillingness to think beyond the individual as the foundational political unit - as part of a historical shift from queer liberation to queer perfomativity that coincides with the advent of neoliberalism and the 'Care of the Self'- style 'politics' of choice."

"Safety requires the removal and containment of people deemed to be threats. White civil society has a psychic investment in the erasure and abjection of bodies onto which they project hostile feelings, allowing them peace of mind amidst the state of perpetual violence."

"The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or defined by the state as 'criminals.'"

"When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that require passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead black boy to make its point."

"But what if - instead of reacting to these charges with counterarguments that persuasively demonstrate that the abolitionist position is the only sensible position - we instead strategically use these charges themselves as points of departure to show how the prison itself is a problem for thought that can only be unthought using a mode of thinking that does not capitulate to the realism of the Present?"

"When we act in accordance with the prophetic dream, the dream comes to directly constitute reality."

"Our bodies are not closed loops. We hold each other and keep each other in time by marching, singing, embracing, breathing. We synchronize our tempos so we can find a rhythm through which the urge to live can be expressed, collectively. And in this way, we set the world into motion. In this way, poets become the timekeepers of the revolution."

[quotes] The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study - Stefano Harney and Fred Moten 2013

  

“Debt, as Harney puts is, presumes a kind of individualized relation to a naturalized economy that is predicated upon exploitation” 

“we cannot be satisfied with the recognition adn acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls” 

“In order to bring colonialism to an end then, one does not speak truth to power, one has to inhabit the crazy, nonsensical, ranting language of the other, the other who has been rendered nonentity by colonialism. Indeed, blackness, for Moten and Harney by way of Fanon, is the willingness to be in the space that has been abandoned by colonialism, by rule, by order.”

“when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening.”

“no one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing this shit down until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us.”

“If there is no church in the wild, if there is study rather than knowledge production, if there is a way of being together in brokenness, if there is an undercommons, then we must all find our way to it.”

“Critique lets us know that politics is radioactive, but politics is the radiation of critique.”

“We owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.”

“In fact, there is no state theory in public administration programs in the United States. Instead, the state is regarded as the proverbial devil we know. And whether it is understood in public administration as a necessary evil, or as a good that is nonetheless of limited usefulness and availability, it is always entirely knowable as an object. Therefore it is not so much that these programs are set against themselves. It is rather that they are set against some students, particularly those who come to public administration with a sense of what Derrida has called a duty beyond duty, or a passion.”

“Any attempt at passion, at stepping out of this skepticism of the known into an inadequate confrontation with what exceeds it and oneself, must be suppressed by this professionalization.”

“The state, the economy, and civil society may change size or shape, labor may enter or exit, and ethical consideration may vary, but these objects are both positivistic and normative, standing in discrete, spatial arrangement each to the other.”

“Perhaps then it needs to be said that the crack dealer, terrorist, and political prisoner share a commitment to war, and society responds in kind with wars on crime, terror, drugs, communism.”

“perhaps more universities promote more jails. Perhaps it is necessary finally to see that the university produces incarceration as the product of its negligence.”

“The university, then, is not the opposite of prison, since they are both involved in their way with the reduction and command of the social individual.”

“What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”

“The anoriginary drive and the insistences it calls into being and moves through, that criminality that brings the law online, the runaway anarchic ground of unpayable debt and untold wealth, the fugal, internal world theater that shows up for a minute serially - poor but extravagant as opposed to frugal - is blackness which must be understood in its ontological difference from black people who are, nevertheless, (under)privileged insofar as they are given (to) an understanding of it.”

“Whom do we mean when we say ‘there’s nothing wrong with us’? The fat ones. The ones who are out of all compass however precisely they are located. The ones who are not conscious when they listen to Les McCann. The Screamers who don’t say much, insolently. The churchgoers who value impropriety. The ones who manage to evade self-management in the enclosure. The ones without interest who bring the muted noise and mutant grammar of the new general interest by refusing. The new general intellect extending the long, extra-genetic line of extra-moral obligation to disturb and evade intelligence. Our cousins. All our friends.”

“The Soviets used to say that the United States had free speech but no one could hear you over the noise of the machines.”

“The NGO is the research and development arm of governance finding new ways to bring to blackness what it is said to lack, the thing that cannot be brought, interests.”

“When governance is understood as the criminalisation of being without interests, as a regulation brought into being by criminality, where criminality is the excess left from criminalisation, a certain fragility emerges, a certain limit, an uncertain imposition by a greater drive, the mere utterance of whose name has again become too black, too strong altogether.”

“Credit is a means of privatization and debt a means of socialisation. So long as they pair in the monogamous violence of the home, the pension, the government, or the university, debt can only feed credit, debt can only desire credit.”

“Governance only works when you work, when you tell us your interests, when you invest your interests again in debt and credit. Governance is the therapy of your interests, and your interests will bring your credit back. You will have an investment, even in debt.”

“The student with interests can demand policies, can formulate policy, give herself credit, pursue bad debtors with good policy, sound policy, evidence-based policy. The student with credit can privatize her own university. The student can start her own NGO, invite others to identify their interests, put them on the table, join the global conversation, speak for themselves, get credit, manage debt. Governance is interest-bearing. Credit and debt. There is no other definition of good governance, no other interest. The public and private in harmony, in policy, in pursuit of bad debt, on the trail of fugitive publics, chasing evidence of refuge. The student graduates.”

“What we are calling policy is the new form command takes as command takes hold.”

“Policy is thus arrayed in the exclusive and exclusionary uniform/ity of contingency as imposed consensus, which both denies and at the very same time seeks to destroy the ongoing plans, the fugitive initiations, the black operations, of the multitude.”

“As resistance from above, policy is a new class phenomenon because the act of making policy for others, of pronouncing others as incorrect, is at the same time an audition for a post-fordist economy that deputies believe rewards those who embrace change but which, in reality, arrests them in contingency, flexibility, and that administered precarity that imagines itself to be immune from what Judith Butler might call our undercommon precariousness. This economy is powered by constant and automatic insistence upon the externalisation of risk, the placement at an externally imposed risk of all life, so that work against risk can be harvested without end.”

“Policy is the form that opportunism takes in this environment, as the embrace of the radically extra-economic, political character of command today… It is a demonstration designed to separate you from others, in the interest of a universality reduced to private property that is not yours, that is the fiction of your own advantage… its ability to see the future of its own survival in this turmoil against those who cannot imagine surviving in this turmoil… Every utterance of policy, no matter its intent or content, is first and foremost a demonstration of one’s ability to be close to the top in the hierarchy of the post-fordist economy.”

“Policy is correction, forcing itself with mechanical violence upon the incorrect, the uncorrected, the ones who do not know to seek their own correction.”

“Governance, despite its own hopes for a universality of exclusion, is for the inducted, for those who know how to articulate interests disinterestedly, those who vote and know why they vote (not because someone is black or female but because he or she is smart), who have opinions and want to be taken seriously by serious people.”

“Policy’s vision is to break it up then fix it, move it along by fixing it, manufacture ambition and give it to your children. Policy’s hope is that there will be more policy, more participation, more change.”

“To work today is to be asked, more and more, to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without pause, to desire without purpose, to connect without interruption.”

“Traditionally strategy led and logistics followed. Battle plans dictated supply lines. No more. Strategy, traditional ally and partner of logistics, is today increasingly reduced to collateral damage in the drive of logistics for dominance. In war without end, war without battles, only the ability to keep fighting, only logistics, matters.”

“Modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak. It was founded in the Atlantic slave trade, founded against Atlantic slaves.”

“Blackness is the site where absolute nothingness and the world of things converge. Blackness is fantasy in the hold and Wilderson’s access to it is in that he is one who has nothing and is, therefore, both more and less than one. He is the shipped. We are the shipped, if we choose to be, if we elect to pay an unbearable cost that is inseparable from an incalculatble benefit.”

“Hapticality, the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you, this feel of the shipped is not regulated, at least not successfully, by a state, a religion, a people, an empire, a piece of land, a totem.”

“There’s a touch, a feel you want more of, which releases you.”

“What is we thought of the experiment of the hold as the absolute fluidity, the informality, of this condition of need and ability? What if ability and need were in constant play and we found someone who dispossed us so that this movement was our inheritance.”

“it’s not so much having a shoebox in which I’m writing down my thoughts as that I’m having a long conversation with a few people.”

“If you ask me, I couldn’t tell you, ‘oh there are these four or five ideas that I’m constant going back to that I have to have in my box.’ It doesn’t feel that way. It feels more like there are one or two things that I’ve been talking about with people forever.”

“the concepts are ways to develop a mode of living together, a mode of being together that cannot be shared as model but as an instance.”

“I’ve been thinking more and more of study as something not where everybody dissolves into the student, but where people sort of take turns doing things for each other or for the others, and where you allow yourself to be possessed by others as they do something.”

“and we just basically had the temerity to believe that our desire for some other mode of being in the world had to be connected to our attempt to understand the way that we were living and the conditions under which we were living at that moment.”

“Everybody is pissed off all the time and feels bad, but very seldom do you enter into a conversation where people are going, ‘why is it that this doesn’t feel good to us?’”

“But, that’s the insidious thing, this naturalisation of misery, the belief that intellectual work requires alienation and immobility and that the ensuing pain and nausea is a kind of badge of honor, a kind of stripe you can apply to your academic robe or something. Enjoyment is suspect, untrustworthy, a mark of illegitimate privilege or of some kind of sissified refusal to look squarely into the fucked-up face of things which is, evidently, only something you can do in isolation.”

“I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that.”

“On the other hand, it does seem to me that you’re asking people to call themselves into a certain form of identity. This is what Gayatri means by the first right being the right to refuse rights, I think.”

“And I don’t say that people should suddenly not do NGO work. But, I also feel that it’s necessary for us to try to elaborate some other forms that don’t take us through those political steps, that don’t require becoming self-determining enough to have a voice and have interests - and to acknowledge that people don’t need to have interests to be with each other.”

“how important it would be, how interesting it might be, what new kinds of things might emerge out of the capacity to refuse to issue the call to order.”

“What emerges is a form, out of something that we call informality. The informal is not the absence of form. It’s the thing that gives form. The informal is not formlessness.”

“the first act of management is to imagine that what’s informal or what’s already going on requires some act to organize it, rather than to join it, rather than to find ways to experiment with this general antagonism.”

“You need to elaborate the principle of autonomy in a way in which you become even less of yourself; or you overflow more than what you’re doing right now. You just need to do more of the shit that you’re doing right now, and that will produce the scale.”

“So, that with and for, the reason we move into more autonomous situations is that it grows, and we spend less time in the antagonism of within and against.”

“The first thing I made everyday when I went to university was myself, and the university these days is not necessarily the best place to make yourself.”

“I owe everything to my mother, I owe everything to my mentor. That stuff also becomes very quickly repressive and very moralistic. There has to be a way in which there can be elaborations of unpayable debt that don’t always return to an individualisation through the family or an individualisation through the wage laborer, but instead the debt becomes a principle of elaboration. And therefore it’s not that you wouldn’t owe people in something like an economy, or you wouldn’t owe your mother, but that the word ‘owe’ would disappear and it would become some other word, it would be a more generative word.”

“But I also know that what it is that is supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It can’t be repaired. The only thing we can do is tear this shit down completely and build something new.”

“I think and I concur, is an abolition of credit, of the system of credit, which is to say, maybe it’s an abolition of accounting. It says that when we start to talk about our common resources, when we talk about what Marx means by wealth - the division of it, the accumulation of it, the privatization of it, and the accounting of it - all of that shit should be abolished. I mean, you can’t count how much we owe one another. It’s not countable. It doesn’t work that way.”

“People were telling us, ‘she owes her son a hundred thousand dollars.’ And me and Laura, driving back, we were like, ‘how you gonna owe your son a hundred thousand dollars? How do you owe a parent a hundred thousand dollars?’ That’s some crazy, barbaric shit. You have to be a barbaric monster to even be able to think of some shit like that. You know what? It’s no more barbaric than owing Wells Fargo Bank a hundred thousand dollars. You think at first glance that it’s barbaric because it appears to violate some sort of notion of filial, maternal relation. But, it’s barbaric because it’s a barbaric way of understanding our undercommon-ness.”

“What I’m really saying when I say that is: anybody who’s breathing should have everything that they need and 93% of what they want - not by virtue of the fact that you work today, but by virtue of the fact that you are here.”

“So, you want to figure out some way that that wealth can be enjoyed. And that’s not by managing it, because managing it is the first step to accounting for it, attributing it or distributing it. It’s about developing some way of being with each other, and of not thinking that that requires the mediation of politics. But, it requires elaboration, it requires improvisation, it requires a kind of rehearsal. It requires things. It’s just that it doesn’t require accounting or management. It requires study.”

[quotes] The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors - Lama Rod Owens 2023

 

"I am not a New Saint because I feel divine or extraordinary. I am a New Saint because I have chosen to give a shit about myself and everyone around me and because I have figured out much of the work I need to do to help people experience the freedom to be their most authentic selves, I do that work, and I keep showing up to do that work."

"Systems of dominance have co-opted the work of goodness to keep people from disrupting systemic violence. In this sense, goodness is understood to be an expression of virtue if it does not challenge the power imbalance and does not make the people who benefit the most from that power imbalance uncomfortable. When you are good, you are not causing trouble. Here I define trouble as creating discomfort for others."

“goodness is the choice I am making each moment to do what is conducive to freedom for me and others. Goodness is a verb that I am actively engaging with: I like to say, ‘I am gooding’ as opposed to ‘I am being good.’

"Voting, educating ourselves, highlighting the voices of the most underrepresented folks, being at least liberal, recycling, carrying people's groceries, reading the current justice books, never saying 'Candyman' into a mirror, putting up Black Lives Matter signs, saying please and thank you, paying taxes, not wearing white shoes after Labor Day, supporting charities, avoiding cracks and walking under ladders, and offering thoughts and prayers are all wonderful things to do, but they are more about feeling good about ourselves and making sure others view us favorably. Which of these beloved labors will actually get us free?"

"Saints are people from various spiritual and religious traditions who have deeply embodied love and compassion and whose embodiment has inspired countless others to aspire to that same practice."

"... the real superpower of the Buddhist saint is giving a shit - giving a shit is an expression of their bodhicitta, or their deep desire to help free people from suffering."

"The first practice is the expression of what I call awakened care: an expression of love and compassion for themselves and others, an expression of joy all grounded in clarity. The most profound care we and others can experience is to be free from suffering and all the causes and conditions of suffering. The second practice is the development of the capacity to disrupt habitual reactivity to everything that arises for us by choosing to experience what arises for us, which helps us transition into a place of responsiveness. Experiencing and then choosing how to respond with care is an expression of liberation. The New Saint can choose the most beneficial way to respond to anything."

"We will not get everyone free because not all of us are ready to be free. When someone isn't ready to be free, forcing them to do the labor of awakening becomes an act of violence. We can neither drag people to freedom nor scare them, manipulate them, intimidate them, or use one of our favorite collective techniques - yell at them on social media - to get them to freedom... Training in awakened care is training in love, compassion, and joy, which helps us to get clear about what it takes to get people free. We can't do the work for others. Each of us must choose liberation on our own terms, and in doing so, commit to our individual labor."

"What we need is vital. If we don't get our needs met, not only will it be difficult to meet the needs of others, but we may also start manipulating those we have committed to help to get our unmet needs fulfilled in ways that are harmful and unethical. On the New Saint's path, we must figure out what we need and acknowledge that our unmet needs create distractions for us and impact the work of liberation for others. This is one of the most challenging aspects of the New Saint's work. We must love ourselves enough to care for ourselves and, in doing so, reduce the labor we force others to do for us."

"... it can become easy to mistake collecting practices as the practice and work itself."

"Freedom is the agency to choose how we want to be in relationship with ourselves and the world around us."

"Regardless of whether we are conscious of this or not, our deepest longing is to remember our liberation, but if we are not actively working to get free, then in a way we are consenting to the delusion of the state."

"When I began practicing community service and activism, I was trying to get free from the violence of systemic oppressions ranging from racism to queerphobia. IT seemed that the best way to honor my life was to dedicate my life's labor to studying freedom, trying to get free, and helping others around me get free."

"With the remembrance came an ethical responsibility called compassion"

"We abolish anything that prevents us from being in direct, honest, and compassionate relationships first with ourselves and then the communities we belong to."

"Most of us are afraid to get free because in freedom we have to do the labor of figuring out who we are... The ego functions best when its boundaries are defined for it... We can't handle space and openness; we don't understand what they say about who are are. Most of us will not get free anytime soon because we don't want to be free. It costs too much. We are too dependent on being defined by the closet... We have become acclimated to the suffering of everything, and we tell ourselves this is how it is and must be."

"Liberation is my primary goal in life, and I am training to align everything I do, say, and think with the goal of liberation. Therefore, I do what is conducive to getting free, while letting go of activity that is not conducive to freedom. This framework helps me to understand that what others have to do to get free is not necessarily what I have to do to get free and vice versa. This keeps me from judging other people's work."

"My ethics are also how I maintain my integrity. My integrity is my clarity as it pertains to the work I am doing in this life. My work is to get free and help as many others get free as possible. The intensity of this clarity is often read as arrogance from people who are not that clear about their work. Most people I meet have jobs and professions that they feel obligated to do to make money. A lot of people don't get joy from their work. It is hard for people to understand that my work is my life; it is what I have chosen as the best possible thing for me to do to benefit people. I am cared for in this work. I am joyful in this work. My needs are met in this work. I am fortunate to have the support I do in this work. This may sound like bragging, but this is what it feels like to find and do your work."

"Love means we touch the ground of reality as it is, not as we want it to be. It is the labor of telling the truth and allowing the truth to tell us. And none of this is supposed to be easy. Allowing ourselves to expand the pain into the space and then to start identifying with the space is how love frees us."

"Conditional love is an expression of love from a place of separation and contraction. People weaponize it against others. I consider conditional loving an act of both personal and interpersonal psychic terrorism that hurts both the person expression conditional love as well as the recipient."

"Compassion is the meeting point between deep empathy for our pain and the pain of others and the wish for us all to be liberated from this pain. The work that arises out of compassion is the strategic and informed intervention into the experience of pain... As I've gotten older, I've begun to feel compassion as an opening to freedom, fluidity, agency, and power to determine how we want to experience freedom. Compassion is not just about caring. It is not the obligatory 'thoughts and prayers' after a tragedy. IT is the work we engage in that begins to undo the root causes of the tragedy."

"Our suffering turns into violence when we can't hold space for the discomfort it causes. We react to it in ways that erase or bypass the experience of who we believe is causing us to suffer. This reactivity replaces the labor of holding and experiencing, distracting us from tending to the primary suffering."

"Felt in the body, joy is the experience of release, a letting go that feels like putting down a heavy package. At other times joy is the experience of the body as a blooming flower. Joy makes us expand outward to connect to all phenomena. We are no longer afraid of everything around us."

"A want is something that feels good to have and experience. Wants fulfill basic desires for pleasure and fun. Though pleasure and fun are wonderful and can also be needs, when we lack an awareness of how to use pleasure as an experience of liberation, it can become self-indulgent, leading to overconsumption. Overconsumption means I bypass what is needed in favor of accumulation. Often I use consumption to cover up or numb discomfort."

"We must know what we need and what we want in order to support the collective in a way that is not reproducing harm and violence. When I know what I need and want, I'll also understand the things that I can't do for myself. And so when I Lean on the collective, knowing what I am asking those around me to help me with, I also understand what I can offer back to the collective. The path of liberatory self-care isn't about bypassing what I need in order to perform a kind of selflessness that makes me look good. Liberatory self-care is about understanding what I need and then understanding how to get what I need while offering others what they need. Ultimately, what we all need is to get free."

"When I think of home, I think of being in a place where I am wanted. I think of being in a place where people notice me and see me. It is a place where I can say my name without fear of being judged or being afraid of hurting someone's feelings. Home means belonging not just to a physical location or a group of people, but to myself. When I say 'home,' I mean that I am resting in my own experience. I am resting within the recognition of who I am, not within the projections of those around me telling me who I am. This king of belonging is restorative care we can offer to ourselves."

"As I find myself sailing through my middle-aged years, it seems that I am becoming like the old church elders, always praying and fasting, watching and fighting. I used to rebel against becoming an old, praying Black man, but this expression is native to my flesh and bones, buried deep in my DNA. My ancestors have called me into the world; I consent to being a reflection of them."

"I also use this space to acknowledge that my body is an extension of the earth, and like the earth, it is a primary support - there can be no work without my body."

"I have known for years that as a descendant of enslaved people I would have to return, somehow, to the experience of the Middle Passage because, as Mother Alice Walker has taught, healing begins where the wound was made."

"She was both a youth and an elder. Her strength never faltered. She was both a mountain and running water, hurricane and gentle breath."

"Touching the earth reminds me that I am an extension of it. The ground feels like my own body. The water is my blood. The wind is my breath. The rain is my tears. The thunder is my anger... To touch the earth is to remember that the earth is alive, free, awakened, and feeling - that it remembers and mourns, that it loves and has no animosity toward us, that it can support us in getting free."

"My body is a loving extension of the earth. Stillness, stability, and a capacity for nurturing and growth are qualities that the earth and body share. When I die, I will be returned to the earth through burial or fire. My ashes will be scattered back to the earth, my Mother. When I walk on the earth, I am walking on my body. When I lie on the earth, I am lying on my body. When the earth is in trauma, I am in trauma. When the earth is colonized, I am colonized."

"I have the hands of people who had to mold survival out of earth; who touched the earth and prayed for food, built shelter from wood and brick, washed clothes by the creek, hauled and sewed, kneaded and braided, held babies, and dug graves for their dead. My ancestors and I link hands together across realms."

"When I am touched by others, they are transferring the essence of their lineage into my body. Just through one touch, I know what they have survived and what their songs are. I can feel their joy, how they have cried in their life, how they have wanted to be free. How we touch is an expression of how other people have touched us."

"My lips remember so many other lips I have kissed in pleasure, in friendship, or as blessing. My kisses have adorned so many bodies. The only reason to have lips is for this adornment."

"I have decided to get braces to further care for my teeth. It was an act of care for myself, and I have noticed how much more I smile and let the world see my teeth. Sometimes we need to do things like this because of how it can help us support our work of helping others. I wish that I could use my practice to transcend anxiety about my teeth, but sometimes we can take a quicker, more worldly path to reduce suffering."

"I feel the erotic when I close my eyes and shift my attention to my heartbeat and the way it reverberates within the essence of all phenomenal reality. The whole world is alive with my pounding heart. The masculine erotic is a life force; it is the point at which I start believing that things are workable and changeable."

"Darkness can be an expression of a different kind of clarity - one that invites us to consider how darkness isn't necessarily asking us to figure it out but instead is asking us to take care of it."

"Loving God is the only way to God in the same way love is the only path to liberation."

"In the New Saint's tradition, I define forgiveness as the experience of wanting the person that hurt me to experience the care they need to be well."

"Of course, disprivileged communities have had to develop a sensitivity to the needs of dominant groups to survive. Maybe we didn't really forgive dominant offender groups, but we had to pretend to in order to make the dominant groups reduce violence against us."

"I love you, but I don't trust you. I don't know how to say that when I look into your eyes. All I see are all my own unmet needs for belonging looking back at me. I know it was never more than just a moment, or a cuddle and orgasm, and yet I still want to run away from this. I get it now. I need more than what I taught myself to settle for."

"I am haunted by how we are born into this world beautiful ones and how that beauty gets broken up into little pieces. And then, broken up, we go about trying to collect the little pieces of our beauty while calling that gathering a life. It is the labor of re-membering not being that occupies our living."

"It's not just about me and this life or this moment; it's about everything. We have a responsibility to remember we are in debt to the beautiful ones who have made our living possible and full of potential. This recognition is how I choose to continue. My heart is full of sorrow and at the same time my heart is a vast ocean of care that can tend to the sorrow. If you don't get this, you will never understand why I do the things that I do."

"And although sometimes I am confused about what freedom feels like or if I am as free as I think I am, I know this for sure: I consent to this sacred work. I consent to the brokenheartedness, the rage, and the hopelessness, as well as to the joy, the gratitude, and the care. I consent to the weight of being healed and the responsibility I choose to get others well and free. This has been the only choice for me in this life. With the help of the saints, both old and new, I keep moving on."

[quotes] Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century - James and Grace Lee Boggs 1974

 

"... we had warned that capitalism had entered a new stage, the stage of multinational capitalism, which was even more destructive than finance and monopoly capitalism because it threatened our communities and our cities."

"When King flew to Watts on August 15, he discovered to his surprise that few black youth in Watts had even heard of him or his strategy of nonviolence, and that, despite the loss of lives, they were claiming victory because their violence had forced the authorities to acknowledge their existence."

"In order to regain our humanity, he said, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values against the triples of racism, materialism, and militarism."

"The revolution to be made in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has enjoyed at the expense of damning over one-third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease and early death. Until the revolutionary forces come to power here, this country will not be safe for the world and revolutionary warfare on an international scale against the United States will remain the wave of the present - unless all of humanity goes up in one big puff."

"It is about creating a new American Dream whose goal is a higher humanity instead of the higher standard of living dependent upon empire."

"In their impatience they see the relation between theory and practice as an antagonistic one. What they call 'practice' is activism: 'Enough of this talk, let's do somethin even if it's wrong.' They have no concept of the flow from revolutionary theory to revolutionary practice and then back again to enriched theory through the evaluation of systemic practice."

"Rebellion is a stage in the development of revolution, but it is not revolution. It is an important stage because it represents the 'standing up,' the assertion of their humanity on the part of the oppressed."

"Hence a rebellion begins with the feeling by the oppressed that 'we can change the way things are,' but it usually ends up by saying 'they ought to do this and they ought to do that.' So that while a rebellion generally begins with the rebels believing in their right to determine their own destiny, it usually ends up with the rebels feeling that their destiny is, in fact, determined by others."

"The only justification for a revolution is that it advances the evolution of man/woman."

"We must know what is the principal contradiction before we can decide who is on the right side and who is on the wrong side."

"How should people spend their lives? Is it sufficient to say that capitalism is responsible for the present state of affairs and that we are all its victims? Or is it necessary to develop new conceptions of appropriate social and human relations and then the concrete programs of struggle necessary to realize these conceptions?"

"A revolutionist must absorb and internalize the lives, the passions, and the aspirations of great revolutionary leaders and not just those of the masses."

"More valuable than those who would die for the revolution are those who would give the rest of their lives to it."

"That is why revolutionary politics is not just a way of contemplating reality but changes reality. The revolutionists who build an organization take responsibility for projecting their answers to the masses. This interaction produces new questions which require new answers and so on. When you become convinced that society must make a sharp break with past values and practices, you become revolutionary. But you do not become a revolutionist until you have organized with others in an organization which takes responsibility for this continuing process of answers and questions."

"They have not accepted the responsibility of revolutionary leadership, which is not just to sympathize with the masses over their wrongs or encourage them in their militancy. That is what the liberal does. Revolutionary leadership, as distinct from liberal leadership, has the duty to help the masses understand what their political goals must be if they are going to achieve any fundamental solution to their problems."

"Having acknowledged the historical and theoretical problem, Lenin saw no concrete alternative to setting up the machinery for centralized planning and controls with all the dangers of a bureaucratic apparatus this entailed and which were soon to become a monstrous fact."

"In doing so, he had left open the question as to whether the entire nation, race, or people oppressed by imperialism constituted the equivalent of an oppressed class."

"In every class society, the masses live restricted lives dominated by economic considerations, while politics remains the province of the ruling class or its agents, the politicians."

"In this concept of transformation or remolding of the masses, Mao was drawing on the centuries-old Chinese cultural tradition which, since the time of Confucius, has stressed moral rather than legal force as the foundation for political authority and legitimacy, and conceives goodness in terms of relation between people rather than as a moral quality which an individual can have on his/her own."

"The oppressed are an integral part of the system which oppresses them, unless they break loose from that system. Therefore until they begin to change themselves, i.e., to become self-determining rather than determined, they cannot get rid of oppressive institutions. Moreover, eliminating oppressive institutions only provides the external conditions for the transformation of people; it does not guarantee that people will change. The change in people has to be made by people themselves."

"Nothing is an end in itself except the continuing struggle to advance, to enlarge one's humanity. Freedom is not for the sake of freedom, democracy is not for the sake of democracy, organization is not for the sake of organization. Each of these is only a means to the evolutionary human goal."

"... rapid human development is a product not of rapid economic development, as the Russian leaders claim, but of political struggles."

"New ideas are not just born... they are created by actual living individuals, with a very few pioneering for the great majority... They come from creative, thoughtful individuals, reflecting upon a specific historical reality which they recognize must be changed, and upon what others have done in the past to try to change that reality."

"National liberation must put an end not only to suffering, but to backwardness. It must enable Africans to rejoin the mainstream of human history and human evolution from which they have been excluded by imperialism. The struggle for national liberation must transform the masses from their present passivity and dependence on others. It must develop in them and through them the power, the will, the capacity, and the structures to govern their own accelerated development. The masses must begin to see themselves as making their own history."

"Only in this way would the ideas, the politics, be in command of the weapons, making the combatants armed militants rather than militarists."

"No matter how close may be the similarity between cases and between the identities of our enemy, national liberation and social revolution are not for export. They are - and every day they become more so - the outcome of a local and national elaboration that is more or less influenced by external factors (favorable or not) but essentially determined and influenced by the historical reality of each people, and carried to success by right solutions to the internal contradictions which arise in this reality."

"Every revolution is the effort to resolve the specific contradictions of a particular society, and can therefore only develop by its own dynamic, through a series of struggles, evaluation of struggles, and new projections for struggling along one road rather than another, by actual living individuals who emerge from but who also expand the social experiences and political perspectives of their people."

"Revolutionists in the United States have yet to wrestle with the awesome challenge of uniting these opposites in a society which has been the beneficiary rather than the victim of imperialist exploitation."

"In a revolutionary period when one's friends and family are likely to be engaged in some form of movement activity, a revolutionist cannot develop the confidence necessary for protracted struggle unless he/she is absolutely clear about the philosophical, historical, and social limitations of other proposals for action."

"First, it must define the main contradiction facing the particular society, the main need and the main aspiration of the people, and hence the main task of the revolution. Then it must propagandize and organize the people to recognize this need and carry out this task."

"The American forces possess a great deal of technical know-how but they have absolutely no sense of political know-why. They fight with machines according to machine principles. There is nothing they can do with the people in Southeast Asia - except exterminate them by converting them into body counts or pacify them by removing them into refugee camps. People have to become numbers and objects first before the American forces know how to deal with them."

"Most people spend their whole lifetime just being utilitarian or materialist, preoccupied only with questions of physical survival and comforts. They do only what they have to do in their own self-interest and/or what they are told to do. They accept whatever occurs in society as beyond their control, as being fixed by others."

"For any fundamental reorganization of society to take place, the eyes and hearts of those at the bottom must be opened to a new, more advanced way of human beings living together."

"As a result, the traditional skills of the craftsman were destroyed, as were al relations between people not based on money."

"Revolutionists seek to change reality, to make it better. Therefore, revolutionists not only need the revolutionary philosophy of dialectics. They need a revolutionary ideology, i.e., a body of ideas based on analyzing the main contradiction of the particular society which they are trying to change, projecting a vision of higher form of reality in which this contradiction would be resolved, and relating this resolution to a social force or forces responsible for and capable of achieving it... Every revolutionist must be absolutely clear about this sequence - from revolutionary philosophy, to revolutionary ideology, to revolutionary politics."

"There still remained the much more difficult and protracted task of creating the new positive of a new social system. Such a social system would be superior to capitalism only if it involved the great masses of the people in continuing, creative, cooperative, self-critical, and self-disciplined practical and productive activity, only if the people themselves were transformed so that they would naturally and unhesitatingly assume responsibility for decision-making and control over the economic and political development of the country."

"... if the masses have not begun to develop a sense of social responsibility before the seizure of power, the new revolutionary government will, sooner rather than later, find itself confronting disappointed and hostile masses who expect miracles from the new government, and are much less patient with it than they were with the gods."

"This new stage of capitalism had not only made it possible for the capitalists to corrupt a substantial section of the working class inside the advanced countries; it had also created a new revolutionary social force inside the systematically undeveloped countries which would be striving for national liberation."

"The revolution to be made in the United States is not to increase the freedom of individual choice. Rather it is to increase the collective consciousness of how to choose, how to grasp both ends in order to pull forward the middle... The revolution to be made in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has enjoyed at the expense of damning over one-third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease, and early death."

"Thus the United States became the only nation in history whose best and brightest minds first led a revolution from colonialism in the name of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all men, and then built a contradiction into their society by explicitly denying human dignity to a quarter of the population they aspired to govern."

"Thus 'that's the law' has become the excuse to evade the contradictions, just as economics has become the excuse to evade social and political issues. Courts, lawyers, prisons, guards, and probation officers proliferate to service the proliferating prisoners produced by the proliferating laws."

"... the United States is now ruled by a Warfare-Welfare State, a state which aims both to satisfy the expanding economic appetites of an increasingly self-interested population and to achieve domination over other powers and other peoples."

"From the very beginning, this nation, and every citizen within it, has been confronted with never-ending choices between economic interests and social justice. Periodically this contradiction has been written into law and deepened by a particular decision, as when the Founding Fathers decided to delete from the original draft of the Declaration of Independence the section condemning slavery and the slave trade."

"At this point, following or staging this scenario is both a farce and a tragedy because of the democratic illusions which it fosters and to sponsor blacks who are victims of U.S. racism, to make political capital of their martyrdom, and then to export them back to the black community as its leaders."

"Today, because of the inseparable development of capitalism and racism, the main contradiction in the United States is the contradiction between its advanced technology and its political backwardness. We are a people who have been psychologically and morally damaged by the unlimited opportunities to pursue material happiness provided by the cancerous growth of the productive forces. As a result, the pursuit of happiness for most Americans means the rejection of the pain of responsibility and learning which is inseparable from human growth. Liberty has turned into license. Equality has become the homogenization of everybody at the lowest common denominator of the faceless anybody. Fraternity has become mass-man cheering and groaning at the various modern spectacles - sports, lotteries, and television give-aways."

"In an advanced country a fundamental distinction has to be made between wants and needs, and people must be brought to understand the necessity to choose between them."

"For example, we will have to discover how to give up or to deny ourselves a lot of things before we can become related to nature again."

"Everyone who rejects society doesn't thereby become revolutionary. Some of these rejecters turn to banditry, thuggery, and some just plain cop-out. For example, what was the objective of the mass assembly of five hundred thousand people at Woodstock? Were they advancing humanity or was it just mass self-indulgence?"

"The point is that when you have a serious idea of where you are going, the number of people that you can hope to recruit either as cadre members or as supporters is very much greater than most potential revolutionaries believe."

"At the other pole, those who have adjusted successfully to the society have done so only because they have accepted the dominant philosophy of our society, that one should strive to get as much for oneself as one can, regardless of anyone else, and that one's life should be organized around that purpose. Go to school so that you can get a better job and earn more. Cater to those in the upper echelons because they may be able to help you get a better job. Go on strike so that you can make more money - no matter what you are producing or what it means to the community. According to this philosophy, government exists only to secure everybody the opportunity to live this way, and the best government is that which provides the most effective umbrella for this kind of life."

"These problems cannot be solved by technology, any more than the war in Indochina could be won by technology. In fact, the application of technology to human relations only introduces more distance into these relations and encourages people to treat each other like things. Human relations can only be changed by human beings who have brought about a fundamental change in the view they have of themselves and of other human beings."

"By what concept of politics have the American people guided themselves that they could accept such a childlike, such a diminished human role for themselves all these years? What is politics? What is the appropriate relation between ethics and politics? What is a nation? What is freedom? What is equality? What is truth? And what is the purpose of a constitution? The answers to these questions cannot be found in any dictionary. They have to be created."

"Politics involves citizenship, the responsibility to a particular polity, the creating of governing structures, of plans, of laws, of leadership - whereas ethics deals with one's social relations with friends, family, and associates, irrespective of citizenship. People have engaged in politics and had no ethics; ethical people have not engaged in politics."

"What does unite Americans or what could unite Americans? We must discover a new basis for American nationhood, one that has nothing to do with who came over on the Mayflower."

"However, what the Western individual usually means by freedom is not a particular political movement - from some particular relationship to another relationship. Few people talk about freedom in terms of the freedom to move and to act with people in a certain relationship. They usually talk about freedom as being able to do what they please - the freedom of the individual. They are dissociating the individual from any necessity, from any relatedness, because to the Western individual any relatedness is a kind of restriction. That sense of individual freedom, precisely because it was once such an advanced idea and had so much scope or expression in the United States, has haunted us all. The liberation groups are permeated by it because they are all heirs to this tradition. Today we must supplant this concept of abstract freedom with another concept of freedom that is based upon relation to nature, to other people in society and in the world, to the past and to the future; one based on inter-relationships which are now necessarily a part of our reality, rather than on the illusion of isolated, internal freedom."

"The concept that all truths which deal with human identity are relative and not absolute is indispensable to the revolutionist. In order to make a revolution, you have to discard the notion that anything one has previously regarded as truth about human beings is necessarily true. It is hard to persuade most radicals of this... We tend to speak of ideas as 'only relative' or 'merely relative' implying that what is relative doesn't matter too much because it is not fixed, as if only fixed truths were important."

"We have to reveal people to themselves - and also to discover the people who are different, who are not determined by their conditions, who are resolved not to be shaped by them."

"At this stage the American revolution consists of discovering what American man/woman wants, now that he/she can have the material things. Only then can we tackle the question of how to achieve it. Our job now is to discover what it is that we want beyond the material. What do we want in our relations with ourselves? How do we conceive our human dignity? What do we want in our relations with each other? IT is something beyond the material, but what is it? Now that we can have the material, and know that it isn't enough, what is it that we want? This question is what bothers Americans most; even race relations are an aspect of it. How does American man/woman want to live tomorrow? It doesn't have to have anything to do with how we lived yesterday."

"Unless there is a revolution in the United States, the United States isn't safe for the world. But the Indochinese can't make the United States revolution. Americans have to make it. In that sense the revolutionary struggle in the United States takes priority over all other struggles."

"Today the huge scale of operations, the destructiveness and wastefulness of so much that is produced, all make it difficult to see one's activity as part of a meaningful whole."

"Positions are a means whereby we get an individual to confront him/herself, to begin to define his/her humanity; whereby we force a person, through ideas, to act rather than just to complain. We take a position in order to force a person to take a position, and thereby to take some responsibility for his/her positions. In other words, we establish a framework within which he/she can grapple with him/herself."

"Many people want to shift the blame for our shame to the military-industrial complex. But the greed of the American people for material goods far in excess of what they need is what has provided the energy, the fuel, for the military-industrial complex. The apparatus is the external cause. The greed of the American people is the internal cause. It is this internal cause which each has to examine and replace with another more human identity."

[quotes] All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life - Winona LaDuke 1999

 

"Mohawk legend says that at one time the earth was one, never-ending ocean. One day, a pregnant woman fell from the sky. A flock of swans carried her down to earth, gently placing her on the back of a large sea turtle. Some beavers then swam to the bottom of the ocean and picked up some soil and brought it back to this woman so she could have some dry ground on which to walk. She then walked in an ever-widening circle on top of the turtle's back, spreading soil around. On this giant turtle's back the earth became whole. As a result, North America is known today by the name Turtle Island." 

"Today, an estimated 24 percent of all North American industry is located on or near the Great Lakes, all of which are drained by the St. Lawrence River." 

"The four leggeds came before the two leggeds. They are our older brothers, we came from them. Before them, we were the root people. That is why we are spiritually related to them. We call them in our language Tatanka, which means 'He Who Owns Us.' We cannot say that we own the buffalo, because he owns us."

"The buffale were made for the prairie, and the prairie for the buffalo."

"But to make this cultural presentation, they would need to throw out all of the Native Hawaiians actually living on the land."

"In 1898, the United States annexed Hawai'i by congressional resolution, without the consent of or compensation to the Kanaka Maoli."

"Of the 194,000 acres that the Department of Hawaiian Homelands (DHHL) today estimates that it oversees on behalf of the Native Hawaiians, over 45 percent is leased out to farmers, for a mere $4 per acre per year. Fourteen percent is designated as public land, i.e., state parks or forest reserves. The military claims over 200,000 acres."

"The majority of the financial benefits of tourism find their way back to the country that invests in tourism, rather than the place that hosts tourists [...] since U.S.-based international corporations control much of the infrastructure of the tourism industry."

"This is not America, this is a colony. The sugar and pineapple plantations were the first wave of colonialism. The military and finally tourism are the next waves of colonialism. The purpose of a colony is to take its land, to take its resources, and exploit its people."

"The world is not so large, it is quite small. There are 27 species of birds on the endangered species list which live in Hawai'i and nest in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and if they develop the oil in the refuge, we will not have those birds. The world is quite small... Because each act is a pebble in a pond. Small pebble, large ripple."

"It is clear that the only ones who can care for an area so well are those who have prayed there for a century."

"The beginning of nationhood, the beginning of sovereignty, and working for self determination, has to do with making right your path with the Creator and practicing your ceremony and your culture."

"Native peoples are the poorest population in North America, yet our lands are home to a wealth of resources. Two-thirds of the country's uranium; one-third of all western low-sulfur coal; and vast hydro-electric, oil, and natural gas resources are all situated on Native land."

[quotes] Fugitive Visions: A Memoir - Jane Jeong-Trenka 2009

 

"Between love and rejection lies fear."

"Keeping a Protestant family together hinges on the beliefs that everyone is the same and nobody should be treated different and nobody should get anything special - which is not faith in the invisible, but invisibility."

"My mother feels that she has to choose between two things: her own goodness or the truth of my experience. In the end, she chooses her own goodness."

"But what was more immediately pressing than criticism from strangers or my being Asian American or his being white was that every day people have to eat. People can fall in love over a series of dinners. They can fall out of love the same way."

"If they knew the true nature of desperation, would you still use the word 'choice' as a synonym for the relinquishment or abandonment of a child?"

"They didn't know that adoption would erase the people who we once were so completely, so irrevocably. Our adoptions would take our language, our culture, our families, our names, our birth dates, our citizenship, and our identities in a perfectly legal process. And the world would view it as charitable and ethical."

"Meanwhile, the praise Koreans lavish upon white people who are trying to speak Korean brings my tentative speech to a screeching halt. The same low level of proficiency that is considered a great accomplishment for a white person is just more proof of defectiveness in an adoptee."

"My lover says, I slept with a lot of women just to sleep with them. Men can do that. Doesn't he know that women can do that too, that a woman's loneliness can be as penetrating as a man's, that a woman can fill herself with man after man, easily, wake up the next morning feeling hollow, so easily, can do that..."

"Jae-dal, you are the son of a white man, and I am the daughter of a white man. We are Americans living in Korea. Your father a soldier, my mother's first husband a soldier, a war that we never lived through but that marks us, that we can neither remember nor forget."

"When a beautiful fairy tale crumbles in your hands, what remains?"

"I fled the U.S. during its war against terror. The Americans had not yet taken the children of Afghanistan or Iraq for adoption, though they tried, because every war displaces family members and creates orphans. I had become more and more a foreigner in my own country, an unpatriot."

"Without a lover, I had such exquisite, cruel freedom."

"If I had been born the first son of my Korean father - not his fifth daughter - I don't think he would have tried to smother me with a blanket when I was born. I probably would have grown up in Korea and continued my father's family line."

"What else could I want? Why am I still not happy? I feel better when I have few connections, few obligations, few things, no furniture. What was I thinking when I ripped up all the sod in the back lawn and planted a garden of vegetables, herbs, and flowers? The following summer I gave my friends all the perennials - the hollyhocks, coneflowers, rosemary, and strawberry vines. I had even told myself that I would wait a decade for the asparagus to mature, but that too I dug up by its roots and distributed in cardboard boxes with the rest."

"Strangers become lovers and then strangers again."

"Although we have traveled oceans and spent all our money just to be together, this is a sad and empty kind of togetherness when everything's cool, it's all OK, everyone can make their own choices and it's not anyone else's problem or responsibility, nothing matters."

"The futility of love, the indifference of the world, and the responsibility of freedom are the tree things that I learned from watching Dominique's life."

[quotes] Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future - Patty Krawec 2022

 

"Grief is about remembering, or unforgetting, the future and a history that could have been."

"Our language does not divide into male and female the way European languages do. It divides into animate and inanimate. The world is alive with beings that are other than humans, and we are all related, with responsibilities to each other."

"Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants come to a place and become part of the existing political system."

"The land itself and the conditions of that land, like altitude and climate, impact our genome just as our human ancestors do."

"These relationships I have inherited, relationships with the United States and Canada and the peoples within these borders, relationships with the church, and relationships that stretch across oceans."

"He sees Christianity as it exists broadly across the Western world - a faith disconnected from land and strangers, ideas imposed by white Europeans who arrived as guests but almost immediately began to act as autocratic hosts."

"But what does it mean to be good relatives - to not only recognize our kinship but to be good kin? Because, for Indigenous peoples, kinship is not simply a matter of being like a brother or a sister to somebody. It carries specific responsibilities depending on the kind of relationship we agree upon. An aunt has different responsibilities than a brother. If we are going to be kin, then we must accept that these relationships come with responsibility."

"Americans admire this desire to boldly go and then bravely defend themselves from those who resent discovery. Discovery, after all, has never been good for those it has discovered. It inevitably leads to exploitation and death."

"Christians are unmoored, landless people. Maybe that disconnection from land is what has led to other disconnections."

"Instead of listening to what the land might have to say for itself, you listen only for what God might be saying through it, reducing it to an empty vessel. It diminishes our investment in the world around us and disconnects us from everything, including people, because we don't listen to them either."

"Our creation stories situate us in a particular place, with particular relationships. Creation stories, whether Christian or Hebrew, Anishinaabe or Hopi, aren't meant to be histories - not in the sense that the Western world has invented the idea of history as an unbiased set of facts. They are meant to explain who we are and create a communal sense of self."

"Our worlds and our stories hold this knowledge. Our origin story is valuable because it not only tells us who we are; it tells us who we can become."

"Multiple creation stories, emerging from multiple gardens, describe the relationships of multiple peoples. There is not a single story to which we must all be reconciled. Not a single story with a single message. Not a single narrative that provides its bearer with authority and power to control the lives of others."

"Land acknowledgments are a moment to pause and reflect on the relationships that exists between the current residents and those who were displaced. What does it mean to live on stolen land? You may not be guilty of the act of dispossession, but it is a relationship that you have inherited."

"Put simply, immigrants come to a place and join with the existing political order. Settlers come to a place and impose a political order. Those who came here by force - such as African people who were enslaved - or those who come through desperation - such as economic or climate refugees or those fleeing war - are welcomed by that political order only according to their usefulness."

"Christians are identified by their beliefs, not their place. But when I say that I am Anishinaabe, I am not only making a claim to who I am; I am making a claim to a place. I am claiming a land that claims be back."

"A relentless ethnic cleansing that began on the East Coast and moved westward as big brother's hunger for land and resources grew ever more demanding."

"To be a 'person' in the United States and Canada is to be a particular kind of person; somebody who is white and Christian, owns property, holds European values. We may think that this is no longer true today. But 98 percent of private property, 856 million acres of it, in the United States is still owned by white Americans."

"We looked at the large spaces that had been dormitory rooms, where children had slept, divided by age and gender. These divisions separated siblings and cousins, further isolating the children from their relatives."

"Slavery was abolished, but the beliefs that justified it were not."

"When you move people off the land, they need to go somewhere, and people without land go to cities."

"But chosen solitude is much different from forced isolation. Solitary confinement is now recognized by many as tortuous in its own right, but at the time, it was conceived as reform."

"Floods are destructive, and grief is part of our great flood stories: grief for what is lost, grief because even what is restored will always be tinged with that loss. Many ancestors were overcome by the waters, and many lives were ended before they had the opportunity to become ancestors."

"Because for Indigenous peoples, kinship means responsibility."

"Land is our first relationship, and it is the first relationship that we need to restore."

"We can't always go home. The reality is that because of fractured relationships, displacement, forced and unforced migrations, we may not know where home is."

"So we name the land, claiming relationship to it. And what if the land also claims us?"

"At one of them, my husband brought me a stone he had picked up on a beach covered in round stones. When I held it in my hand, it felt like mine. Not mine like a thing that was now in my possession but mine like my children are mine and like my parents are mine. We belonged to each other."

"Stones are ancient, older than water, older than time. Bones of the earth. They've been through so many worlds, so many floods, and they hold all the memory and knowledge that comes with it. Eternity sits in my hand, and it ties me to home."

"So we cannot talk about restoring our relationship to land without talking about restoring the land to relationship with the people from whom it was taken."

"The land and the waters have absorbed the blood and sweat of generations, watched babies become old men and women and return to them. We are part of each other."

"I don't know if the land is alive, not in the way that I know my dogs are alive. But it might be. And I've stopped bringing home rocks that don't belong to me."

"We have begun to unravel the history we have been taught, unforgetting our relationships with this place and each other. We are challenging the myths that we were told about ourselves and each other, and we are learning the language to transform and confront settler colonialism. But there is no magic bullet. No single book you can read, no one podcast to listen to, no perfect Twitterati to follow, no percentage you can donate, and no amount of time you can spend outside in nature will put things right. We have to build relationships."

"Helping feels good, but it is paternal; without relationship, it embeds hierarchy."

"Aanikoobijian is the Ojibwe word for 'great-grandparent' or 'ancestor.' But it is also the word for 'great-grandchild' or 'descendant.' The word I would use to describe the person three generations before me and the person three generations after me is the same word and it connects seven generations."

"Thinking in cyclical rather than linear time, we see more clearly the ways that generations are linked."

"Think of something precious in your bundle, one of those things you would take with you if you had to flee. Look carefully at it and consider everyone whom that object connects you with. Sit with it in your hand and let this object speak to you of relationships and time."

"Belonging involves a reciprocity of claiming and being claimed, of responsibility to the community and the community's responsibility to me. Of seeing and being seen."

"'Your ancestors are always your ancestors.' he wrote, ; but their communities may not be your communities.'"

"Colonialism works in all of us, to destroy and replace: destroying relationships and replacing them with isolated identities we can move around the country."

"Returning to yourself means understanding how your ancestors were used, wittingly or not, to displace and replace, and then working with us to ensure that we are safe from further displacement."

"Migrants fleeing the violence that the colonial West outsources to protect itself did not choose to abandon their homelands. But however you arrived, we must all choose how we will live here."

"Returning to yourself means picking up those threads and working through what it means to find home in the place you were removed to."

"To make a timeline or visual history of your family, take a moment to sketch out a family tree, the names, dates, and places as best as you can remember them."

"And it was the work I did ahead of time that allowed me to hear and understand the things they were telling me without becoming defensive. That allowed me to move toward solidarity with them and becoming kin."

"Doing the work of picking up your own bundle, of returning to yourself, will help you move from being a settler to becoming kin. You'll see what you have to offer - because you do have things to offer."

[quotes] Last Night at the Telegraph Club - Malinda Lo 2021

 

"1954 - the San Francisco Police Department launches a drive against so-called 'sex-deviates,' raiding gay bars and other known gay gathering places."

"Silky heat ran through her like a river."

"It was as if there were cycles that repeated themselves over and over, but most people never saw the repetition; they were too deeply enmeshed in their own path to see."

"Perhaps that was the most perverse part of this: the inside-outness of everything, as if denial would make it go away, when it only made the pain in her chest tighten, when it only made her emotions clearer."

[quotes] We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice - adrienne maree brown 2022

 

"I hold space for movement growth, and every time humans are present, so is conflict, and all manner of harmful human behavior."

"Emergent strategy suggests that we must work hard at getting abolitionist practice functional at a small scale so that large-scale abolition and transformative justice are more visible, rootable, possible."

"These teachers brought me to transformative justice, the work of addressing harm at the root, outside the mechanisms of the state, so that we can grow into right relationship with each other."

"We need to flood the entire system with life-affirming principles and practices, to clear the channels between us of the toxicity of supremacy, to heal from the harms of a legacy of devaluing some lives and needs in order to indulge others."

"As Maurice Moe Mitchell said, we have to have a low bar for entry and a high bar for conduct."

"In the longest term vision I can see, when we, made of the same miraculous material and temporary limitations as the system we are born into, inevitably disagree, or cause harm, we will respond not with rejection, exile, or public shaming, but with clear naming of harm; education around intention, impact, and pattern breaking; satisfying apologies and consequences; new agreements and trustworthy boundaries; and lifelong healing resources for all involved."

"Where winning is measured not just by the absence of patterns of harm, distrust, and isolation, but by the presence of healing and healthy interdependence."

"... I feel so much possibility on the horizon around how we get good at conflict and turn and face the harm and abuse rampant in our movement communities, learn to be in the complex work of abolition and survival, and actually transform the systems that hurt us into systems that hold us and allow us to heal."

"In a nutshell, principled struggle is when we are struggling for the sake of something larger than ourselves and are honest and direct with each other while holding compassion."

"Contradictions can be handled by widening our perspective, acknowledging that these oppositional truths co-exist."

"I think everyone chooses each day to move towards life or away from it, though some don't realize that they are making the choice. Capitalism makes it hard to see your own direction."

"I want us to let go of the narrowness of innocence, widen our understanding of how harm moves through us. I want us to see individual acts of harm as symptoms of systemic harm, and to do what we can do collectively to dismantle the systems and get as many of us free as possible."

"Not already beyond harm, but accountable for doing our individua land internal work to end harm and engage in generative conflict, which includes actively working to gain awareness of the ways we can and have harmed each other, where we have significant political differences, and where we can end cycles of harm and unprincipled struggle in ourselves and our communities."

"How do I hold a systemic analysis and approach when each system I am critical of is peopled, in part, by the same flawed and complex individuals that I love?"

"Demonizing is more efficient than relinquishing our world views, which is why we have slavery, holocausts, lynchings, and witch trials in our short human history. 'Why?' can be an evolutionary question."

"What I want to know is: What can this teach me/us about ho to improve our humanity?"

"What will learn to set and hold boundaries, communicate without manipulation, give and receive consent, ask for help, love our shadows without letting them rule our relationships, and remember we are of earth, of miracle, of a whole, of a massive river - love, life, life, love."

"We may not have time, or emotional capacity, to walk each path together. We are all flailing in the unknown at the moment, terrified, stretched beyond ourselves, ashamed, realizing the future is in our hands. We must all do our work. Be accountable and go heal, simultaneously, continuously. It's never too late."

"But, when we are able to discern between what our triggered bodies say and what our grounded bodies do, we can build the kinds of systems and practices we need to align our leadership and our movements."

"Everyone has worked this earth as we have walked it. While all harms are not equal, even the most heinous require a way home."

[quotes] We Do This 'Til we Free Us (Abolitionist Papers) - Mariame Kaba 2021

 

"Black people comprise 13 percent of the US population but roughly 30 percent of the arrested, 35 percent of the imprisoned, 42 percent of those on death row, and 56 percent of those serving life sentences."

"Refusal: because we cannot collaborate with the prison-industrial complex, as 'only evil will collaborate with evil' (June Jordan). Care: because 'care is the antidote to violence' (Saidiya Hartman). Collectivity: because 'everything worthwhile is done with others' (Moussa Kaba)."

"PIC abolition is a vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more things that are foundational to our personal and community safety."

"PIC abolition is a positive project that focuses, in part, on building a society where it is possible to address harm without relying on structural forms of oppression or the violent systems that increase it."

"Moreover, crime and harm are not synonymous. All that is criminalized isn't harmful, and all harm isn't necessarily criminalized."

"First, when we set about trying to transform society, we must remember that we ourselves will also need to transform."

"Second, we must imagine and experiment with new collective structures that enable us to take more principled action, such as embracing collective responsibility to resolve conflicts."

"Third, we must simultaneously engage in strategies that reduce contact between people and the criminal legal system."

"Fourth, as scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes, building a different world requires that we not only change how we address harm but also that we change everything."

"Let's begin our abolitionist journey not with the question 'What do we have now, and how can we make it better?' Instead, let's ask 'What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?'"

"We need to change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers."

"We live in a society that has been locked into a false sense of inevitability."

"If I'm making my stand in the world and that benefits my particular community of people, the people I designate as my community, and I see them benefiting by my labor, I feel good about that. That actually is enough for me."

"I don't believe in self-care: I believe in collective care, collectivizing our care, and thinking more about how we can help each other."

"I don't see the world the way that people do here. I don't agree with it; I think capitalism is actually continuously alienating us from each other, but also even from ourselves, and I just don't subscribe."

"Even when the system ensnares a non-Black person, the prion-industrial complex remains a structurally anti-Black apparatus, firmly rooted in the United States' ongoing reliance on the financial exploitation and social control of Black people."

"The reparations framework outlines five elements - repair, restoration, acknowledgment, cessation, and non-repetition."

"Abolition, for me, is a long-term project and a practice around creating the conditions that would allow for the dismantling of prisons, policing, and surveillance and the creation of new institutions that actually work to keep us safe and are not fundamentally oppressive."

"I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle."

"We must accept that the ordinary is fair for an extreme to be the problem."

"Sadly, their circulation seems to demonstrate, as Frank Wilderson puts it, that 'taxonomy can itemize atrocities but cannot bear witness to suffering.'"

"Once things are actualized into the world and exist, you can't imagine how the world functioned before it. It's like we develop amnesia."

"How are you going to make life livable for people living in unlivable circumstances?"

"You can have security without relationships but you cannot have safety - actual safety - without healthy relationships."

"Part of what this necessitates is that we have to work with members of our communities to make violence unacceptable."

"In the ed, a practice of abolitionist care underscores that our fates are intertwined and our liberation is interconnected."

"Let's be clear though: advocating for someone's imprisonment is not abolitionist. Mistaking emotional satisfaction for justice is also not abolitionist."

"The criminal legal system, for example, focuses on punishing or disempowering individual 'offenders' who have done harm. PIC abolitionists, however, consider the larger social, economic, and political context in which the harm occurs."

"The fact that sexual violence is so incredibly pervasive should tell us that it's not a story of individual monsters. We have got to think about this in a more complex way if we're really going to uproot forms of sexual violence."

"Transformative justice takes as a starting point the idea that what happens in our interpersonal relationships is mirrored and reinforced by the larger system."

"It's so complicated. Sometimes our feelings aren't actually aligned with our values."

"In part that's why we're supposed to have a community that can hold when these things are happening so that our feelings don't end up governing how we're going to live in the world - for everybody, how all of us are going to be governed together."

"'Vengeance is a lazy form of grief.'"

"Because we need time and space to grieve when hard things happen, when bad things happen to us."

"And so it was that my community held EV in her humanity while seeking to hold her accountable for her actions."

"And also, boundaries are usually a negotiation between what you want and what other people want. It's not like a firm, set thing. You have to get really good at being able to negotiate. And the only way to do that is to know who you are."

"Everything that is worthwhile is done with other people."

"I believe that when we are in relationship with each other, we influence each other. What matters to me, as the unit of interest, is relationships."

"Angela Davis says this perfectly, she's like knowledge is built through struggle. It isn't just built through somebody theorizing an idea. But through struggle, together, we come up with new concepts and ideas: that's the best thinking."

"Ella Baker's question, 'Who are your people?' when she would meet you is so important. Who are you accountable to in this world? Because that will tell me a lot about who you are."

"Mary Hooks has that right - that you have to be willing to be transformed in the service of the work and the struggle."