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February 26 - May 21, 2025
You can be an outsider, but not outside the system, and you can have political beliefs, even radical ones, but they need to stay within the bounds of the permissible, inside that bubble that has been drawn for you by the elites.
A place that is now flanked by military personnel as well as private security companies. I often wonder what their job is: to protect the people, the human beings inside, or to protect the place itself, the concept, the ideology embodied in it?
All around us and up close, we are being told not to care. Not to collectivize, not to confront.
It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.
Black feminism emerged as a theoretical and practical effort demonstrating that race, gender, and class are inseparable in the social worlds we inhabit.
Moreover, the most profitable sector of the private prison business is composed of immigrant detention centers. One can therefore understand why the most repressive anti-immigrant legislation in the United States was drafted by private prison companies as an undisguised attempt to maximize their profits.
The important issues in the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination are minimized and rendered invisible by those who try to equate Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid with terrorism.
That was the whole point. And also it might be important to point out that the Israeli police have been involved in the training of US police. So there is this connection between the US military and the Israeli military. And therefore it means that when we try to organize campaigns in solidarity with Palestine, when we try to challenge the Israeli state, it’s not simply about focusing our struggles elsewhere, in another place. It also has to do with what happens in US communities.
The problem is that it is often assumed that the eradication of the legal apparatus is equivalent to the abolition of racism. But racism persists in a framework that is far more expansive, far vaster than the legal framework.
Racism is so dangerous because it does not necessarily depend on individual actors, but rather is deeply embedded in the apparatus…
but too often people feel that they are not sufficiently informed to consider themselves an advocate of justice in Palestine. The question is how to create windows and doors for people who believe in justice to enter and join the Palestine solidarity movement.
The very existence of the prison forecloses the kinds of discussions that we need in order to imagine the possibility of eradicating these behaviors.
Just send them to prison. Just keep on sending them to prison. Then of course, in prison they find themselves within a violent institution that reproduces violence. In many ways you can say that the institution feeds on that violence and reproduces it so that when the person is released he or she is probably worse.
We can’t only think about the prison as a place of punishment for those who have committed crimes. We have to think about the larger framework. That means asking: Why is there such a disproportionate number of Black people and people of color in prison? So we have to talk about racism. Abolishing the prison is about attempting to abolish racism. Why is there so much illiteracy? Why are so many prisoners illiterate? That means we have to attend to the educational system. Why is it that the three largest psychiatric institutions in the country are jails in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: Rikers
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Well, I think that you can say that all over the world now the institution of the prison serves as a place to warehouse people who represent major social problems.
In many ways you can say that the prison serves as an institution that consolidates the state’s inability and refusal to address the most pressing social problems of this era.
The death penalty is about structural racism and it incorporates historical memories of slavery. We cannot understand why the death penalty continues to exist in the United States in the way that it does, without an analysis of slavery.
You’ve been an activist for decades. What keeps you going? Do you think we should remain optimistic about the future? Well, I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.
As private prison companies have long recognized, the most profitable sector of the prison-industrial complex is immigrant detention and deportation.
This appalling treatment of undocumented immigrants from the UK to the US compels us to make connections with Palestinians who have been transformed into immigrants against their will, indeed into undocumented immigrants on their own ancestral lands.
Before Palestinians are even arrested, they are already in prison. One misstep and one can be arrested and hauled off to prison; one can be transferred from an open-air prison to a closed prison.
As a matter of fact, trans people of color constitute the group most likely to be arrested and imprisoned. Racism provides the fuel for maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of the prison-industrial complex.
Palestine will be free!
Fannie Lou Hamer—she was a sharecropper and a domestic worker. She was a timekeeper on a cotton plantation in the 1960s. And she emerged as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and as a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She said, “All my life, I have been sick and tired. Now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
The Emancipation Proclamation is perhaps the most misunderstood of the documents that have shaped American history. Contrary to legend, Lincoln did not free the nearly four million slaves with a stroke of his pen. It had no bearing on slaves in the four border states, since they were not in rebellion. The Proclamation also exempted certain parts of the Confederacy occupied by the Union. All told, it left perhaps 750,000 slaves in bondage.
President Nixon’s law-and-order rhetoric entailed the labeling of groups such as the Black Panther Party as terrorist, and I myself was similarly identified. But it was not until George W. Bush proclaimed a global war on terror in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, that terrorists came to represent the universal enemy of Western “democracy.”
those who counter the slogan “Black Lives Matter” with what they assume is a more all-embracing slogan, “All Lives Matter,” are often embracing a strategy that glosses over the particular reasons why it is important to insist quite specifically on an end to racist violence.
If indeed all lives mattered, we would not need to emphatically proclaim that “Black Lives Matter.”
If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.
those who assume that because slavery was legally abolished in the nineteenth century, it was thereby relegated to the dustbin of history, fail to recognize the extent to which cultural and structural elements of slavery are still with us.
And in some senses the struggle for women’s rights was ideologically defined as a struggle for white middle-class women’s rights, pushing out working-class and poor women, pushing out Black women, Latinas, and other women of color from the discursive field covered by the category “woman.”
But you should also read Beth Richie’s most recent book, an amazing book called Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation.
