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January 22 - April 9, 2025
Everyone and everything tells you that “outside” you will not succeed, that it is too late, that we live in an epoch where a revolution cannot happen anymore. Radical changes are a thing of the past. 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.
people can unite, that democracy from below can challenge oligarchy, that imprisoned migrants can be freed, that fascism can be overcome, and that equality is emancipatory.
The powerful have sent us a message: obey, and if you seek collective liberation, then you will be collectively punished. In the case of Europe, it’s the violence of austerity and borders where migrant lives are negated, allowed to drown in sea buffer zones. In the case of the United States, Black and Native lives are systematically choked by an enduring white supremacy that thrives on oppression and settler colonialism, and is backed by drones, the dispossession of territory and identity to millions, mass incarceration, the un-peopleing of people, and resource grabs that deny that indigenous
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It is easy to feel discouraged and simply let go. There is no shame in that. We are, after all, engaged in a struggle that seems, if we look at it using a mainstream political framework and through a mass media prism, unwinnable.
How to explain to people in Ferguson that what is happening in Palestine is also about them, and vice versa for the people of Palestine. How to make the struggle a truly global one, one in which everybody on the planet has a part to play and understands that role.
How can we build such a movement, based on those ethics in a society that promotes selfishness and individualism?
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.
What we have lacked over these last five years is not the right president, but rather well-organized mass movements.
Black feminism emerged as a theoretical and practical effort demonstrating that race, gender, and class are inseparable in the social worlds we inhabit.
As progressives in the Global North, we certainly have not acknowledged our major responsibilities in the continuation of military and ideological attacks on people in the Arab world.
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.
imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems—racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on. These issues are never seriously addressed. It is only a matter of time before people begin to realize that the prison is a false solution.
Abolitionist advocacy can and should occur in relation to demands for quality education, for antiracist job strategies, for free health care, and within other progressive movements.
The soaring numbers of people behind bars all over the world and the increasing profitability of the means of holding them captive is one of the most dramatic examples of the destructive tendencies of global capitalism. But the obscene profits obtained from mass incarceration are linked to profits from the health care industry and from education and other commodified human services that actually should be freely available to everyone.
that questions about the validity of violence should have been directed to those institutions that held and continue to hold a monopoly on violence: the police, the prisons, the military.
advocacy of revolutionary transformation was not primarily about violence, but about substantive issues like better life conditions for poor people and people of color.
Placing the question of violence at the forefront almost inevitably serves to obscure the issues that are at the center of struggles for justice.
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.
There are currently some five thousand Palestinian prisoners and we know that since 1967, eight hundred thousand Palestinians—40 percent of the male population—have been imprisoned by Israel.
we must be willing to embrace the long walk toward freedom.
What we saw in the police reaction to the resistance that spontaneously erupted in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown was an armed response that revealed the extent to which local police departments have been equipped with military arms, military technology, military training. The militarization of the police leads us to think about Israel and the militarization of the police there—if only the images of the police and not of the demonstrators had been shown, one might have assumed that Ferguson was Gaza.
in the aftermath of the advent of the war on terror, police departments all over the US have been equipped with the means to allegedly “fight terror.”
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…
intersectionality—or efforts to think, analyze, organize as we recognize the interconnections of race, class, gender, sexuality—has
This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, the work of bell hooks and Michelle Wallace, and the anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies.
But you can’t simply invite people to join you and be immediately on board, particularly when they were not necessarily represented during the earlier organizing processes. You have to develop organizing strategies so that people identify with the particular issue as their issue. This is why I was suggesting in response to the question about Michelle Alexander that these connections need to be made in the context of the struggles themselves. So as you are organizing against police crimes, against police racism, you always raise parallels and similarities in other parts of the world. And not
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many people assume that in order to be involved with Palestine, you have to be an expert.
Why is that person bad? The prison forecloses discussion about that. What is the nature of that badness? What did the person do? Why did the person do that? If we’re thinking about someone who has committed acts of violence, why is that kind of violence possible? Why do men engage in such violent behavior against women? 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.
It’s a big money-making business. It’s totally a money-making business. They do need prisoners, right? Absolutely. Especially given the increasing privatization of prisons, but there is privatization beyond private prisons. It consists of the outsourcing of prison services to all kinds of private corporations, and these corporations want larger prison populations. They want more bodies. They want more profits. And then you look at the way in which politicians always note that, whether there is a high crime rate or not, law-and-order rhetoric will always help to mobilize the voting population.
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 end of slavery per se was not going to solve the myriad problems created by the institution of slavery.
Whenever you conceptualize social justice struggles, you will always defeat your own purposes if you cannot imagine the people around whom you are struggling as equal partners.
we have to talk about systemic change. We can’t be content with individual actions.
That means reconceptualizing the role that the police play. That means perhaps establishing community control of the police. Not simply a review of actions in the aftermath of a crime by the police, but community bodies that have the power to actually control and dictate the actions of the police. That means addressing racism in the larger sense. It means also, looking at the ways in which police are encouraged to use violence as a first resort and the connection between this institutionalized violence and other modes of violence.
elements of racism and it’s often those structural elements that aren’t taken into consideration when there is discussion about ending racism or challenging racism.
Anyway I don’t think we can rely on governments, regardless of who is in power, to do the work that only mass movements can do.
The prison-industrial complex has something to do with the CIA’s use of secret prisons and the torture that was recently revealed.
And this is something that’s often forgotten, the role that children actually played in breaking the stronghold of silence regarding racism.
the Black struggle in the US serves as an emblem of the struggle for freedom.
I visited Villa Grimaldi, where Pinochet tortured and killed many people. People told me that about 60 percent of the Palestinian community in Chile, which is one of the wealthiest in the world as well, supported Pinochet during the regime. Not because Pinochet tortured and killed people, but because Pinochet was a neoliberal. They were interested in keeping their wealth and privileges. So before condemning the torture they were looking at their wallets.
the whole notion of intersectionality that has characterized the kind of feminisms we’re talking about, that we cannot simply look at gender in isolation from race, from class, from sexuality, from nationality, from ability, from a whole range of other issues that Palestinians, or people in the Palestinian struggle, have given expression to that and have actually helped people in the US imagine broader notions of intersectionality.
I think I spoke in the last interview about the tweets of Palestinian activists used to provide advice for protesters in Ferguson, on how to deal with the tear gas, so that direct connection that has been facilitated by social media has been important as well.
“What is the role of student activism today, and how should students think about the relationship to the broader community and the movements that surround the campuses particularly in a time when universities are becoming increasingly elite institutions?” Certainly, and historically UCLA has been the center of a whole number of struggles that are linked to the community. I can mention my own struggle at UCLA. But I think that now students who challenge the borders of the university and the attempt to establish universities as a stronghold of neoliberal elitism, those challenges are extremely
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Well, I think that we constantly have to make connections. So that when we are engaged in the struggle against racist violence, in relation to Ferguson, Michael Brown, and New York, Eric Garner, we can’t forget the connections with Palestine. So in many ways I think we have to engage in an exercise of intersectionality.
when we see the police repressing protests in Ferguson we also have to think about the Israeli police and the Israeli army repressing protests in occupied Palestine.
That we cannot assume that it is possible to be victorious in any antiracist movement as long as we don’t consider how gender figures in, how gender and sexuality and class and nationality figure into those struggles.
And I think that feminism is not an approach that is or should be embraced simply by women but increasingly it has to be an approach embraced by people of all genders.
