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Trying and trying again. Never stopping. That is a victory in itself.
The powerful have sent us a message: obey, and if you seek collective liberation, then you will be collectively punished.
Progressive struggles—whether they are focused on racism, repression, poverty, or other issues—are doomed to fail if they do not also attempt to develop a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist 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.
In many ways, the demands of the BPP’s Ten-Point Program are just as relevant—or perhaps even more relevant—as during the 1960s, when they were first formulated.
We are still faced with the challenge of understanding the complex ways race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and ability are intertwined—but
Moreover, the most profitable sector of the private prison business is composed of immigrant detention centers.
There are vast numbers of people behind bars in the United States—some two and a half million—and imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems—racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on.
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.
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.
Interestingly Nelson Mandela—who has been sanctified as the most important peace advocate of our time—was kept on the US terrorist list until 2008.
If, for example, we in the United States could force the Obama administration to cease its $8 million-a-day support of Israel, this would go a long way toward pressuring Israel to end the occupation.
since 1967, eight hundred thousand Palestinians—40 percent of the male population—have been imprisoned by Israel.
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 use of state violence against Black people, people of color, has its origins in an era long before the civil rights movement—in colonization and slavery.
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…
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.
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.
Well of course, there is a whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change.
When one looks at the civil rights era, it was those mass movements—anchored by women, incidentally—that pushed the government to bring about change.
And the Black radical tradition is related not simply to Black people but to all people who are struggling for freedom.
Well, I think the interconnectedness of antiracist movements with gender is crucial, but we also need to do this with class, nationality, and ethnicity—I don’t think that we can imagine Black movements in the same way today as we once did.
Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.
G4S is the third-largest private corporation in the world—behind Walmart, which is the largest, and Foxconn, the second largest.
Against this backdrop, let us explore the deep involvement of G4S in the global prison-industrial complex. I am not only referring to the fact that the company owns and operates private prisons all over the world, but that it is helping to blur the boundary between schools and jails.
On any given day there are almost 2.5 million people in our country’s jails, prisons, and military prisons, as well as in jails in Indian country and immigrant detention centers.
As a matter of fact, trans people of color constitute the group most likely to be arrested and imprisoned.
Just as we say “never again” with respect to the fascism that produced the Holocaust, we should also say “never again” with respect to apartheid in South Africa, and in the southern US.
As a matter of fact during the 1950s, some 90 percent of all Black women were domestic workers. And given the fact that the majority of people who rode buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 were Black domestic workers, why is it so difficult to imagine and acknowledge what must have been, among these Black women domestic workers, this amazing collective imagination of a future world without racial and gender and economic oppression?
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.”
I have thought that perhaps we were not asked to reflect on the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation because we might realize that we were never really emancipated.
I’ll say parenthetically—the fight was for noncommodified education. And as a matter of fact white children in the South, poor white children who had not had education, gained access to education as a direct result of the struggles of former slaves.
As a matter of fact, the Ku Klux Klan and the racial segregation that was so dramatically challenged during the mid-twentieth-century freedom movement was produced not during slavery, but rather in an attempt to manage free Black people who would have otherwise been far more successful in pushing forward democracy for all.
Our understandings of and resistance to contemporary modes of racist violence should thus be sufficiently capacious to acknowledge the embeddedness of historical violence—of settler colonial violence against Native Americans and of the violence of slavery inflicted on Africans.
At a time when we are urged to settle for fast solutions, easy answers, formulaic resolutions, Ferguson protesters said no.
Palestinian activists, accustomed to police attacks with tear gas, tweeted advice and encouragement to Ferguson protesters.
The Ferguson struggle has taught us that local issues have global ramifications.
So I’d like to point out that individual memories are not nearly as long as the memories of institutions, and especially repressive institutions.
You should be very suspicious because as more youth are rendered disposable, as more youth become a part of surplus populations that can only be managed through imprisonment, the schools that could begin to solve the problems of disposability are being shut down.
Male prisons are represented as violent places. But we see, especially by looking at the predicament of trans women, that this violence is often encouraged by the institutions themselves.
Perhaps most important of all, and this is so central to the development of feminist abolitionist theories and practices: we have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as “normal.”
I suppose just about everyone who’s in the field of feminist studies has read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.
Somehow...I have not. Yet.
But by extension, there’s another lesson: don’t even become too attached to the concept of gender. Because, as a matter of fact, the more closely we examine it, the more we discover that it is embedded in a range of social, political, cultural, and ideological formations.
academics are trained to fear the unexpected, but also activists always want to have a very clear idea of our trajectories and our goals. And in both instances we want control.
We want control, so that oftentimes our scholarly and activist projects are formulated just so that they reconfirm what we already know. But that is not interesting. It is boring. And so how to allow for surprises, and how do we make these surprises productive?
“Before you look at your calendar, you should know that we are a gay square dance club.” And so she quickly retorted, “Well, before I look at my calendar, you should know that I am a Black square dance caller.” So at that moment square dancing became both Black and gay, which probably changed something about square dancing as well.
Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.
if we look at imprisoned women, who are also a very small percentage throughout the world, we learn not only about women in prison, but we learn much more about the system as a whole than we would learn if we look exclusively at men.
We can follow the lead of Beth Richie in thinking about the dangerous ways in which the institutional violence of the prison complements and extends the intimate violence of the family, the individual violence of battery and sexual assault.
