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January 2 - January 12, 2025
She remains—after more than fifty years of struggle, suffering, and service—the most recognizable face of the left in the US Empire.
Trying and trying again. Never stopping. That is a victory in itself.
All around us and up close, we are being told not to care. Not to collectivize, not to confront.
It’s reflected in her support for anticolonial struggles all over the world, including Palestine,
And it’s in everyone’s power to partake in the struggle.
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.
I also think you are absolutely right in identifying grassroots activism as being the most important ingredient of building radical movements.
intensification of anti-Muslim racism in the United States, Europe, and Australia.
Moreover, the most profitable sector of the private prison business is composed of immigrant detention centers.
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. It can help promote an anticapitalist critique and movements toward socialism.
What does the booming of the prison-industrial complex say about our society?
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.
Placing the question of violence at the forefront almost inevitably serves to obscure the issues that are at the center of struggles for justice.
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.
utterly shocked by what we saw and we resolved to encourage our constituencies to join the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement and to help intensify the campaign for a free Palestine.
Likewise, it is up to the Palestinian people to employ the methods they deem most likely to succeed in their struggle.
most Palestinian families have had at least one member imprisoned by the Israeli authorities.
since 1967, eight hundred thousand Palestinians—40 percent of the male population—have been imprisoned by Israel.
if only the images of the police and not of the demonstrators had been shown, one might have assumed that Ferguson was Gaza.
It’s actually fortunate for those of us who are trying to participate in the building of a mass movement that some recent cases of police killings and vigilante killings have been widely publicized within the country as well as internationally.
we can recognize that practices that originated with slavery were not resolved by the civil rights movement.
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.
It reminds us obviously of South Africa, where legally apartheid was ended, but an economic apartheid, even sociological apartheid, is still in place.
Racism is so dangerous because it does not necessarily depend on individual actors, but rather is deeply embedded in the apparatus…
Triple jeopardy was racism, sexism, and imperialism. Of course, imperialism reflected an international awareness of class issues.
So behind this concept of intersectionality is a rich history of struggle.
Initially intersectionality was about bodies and experiences.
My experience has been that many people assume that in order to be involved with Palestine, you have to be an expert. So people are afraid to join because they say, “I don’t understand.
We internalize this notion of a place to put bad people.
The very existence of the prison forecloses the kinds of discussions that we need in order to imagine the possibility of eradicating these behaviors.
because it would allow people to be rehabilitated.
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 end of slavery per se was not going to solve the myriad problems created by the institution of slavery.
It may not always be easy to guarantee the participation of prisoners, but without their participation and without acknowledging them as equals, we are bound to fail.
Men can often talk to men in a different way. It’s important for those who we might want to bring into the struggle to look at models.
Whereas in actuality they happen all the time. And we assume that if we are only able to punish the perpetrator, then justice will have been done.
we have to talk about systemic change. We can’t be content with individual actions.
Do you think this has to do with stereotypes, the way that society and the media portray Black people as potentially dangerous, potentially criminal…creating this image in people’s minds, creating prejudice? Yes, absolutely.
the election of Obama was hailed as the possible beginning of a so-called postracial era.
Interestingly enough during the last period we haven’t had visual images that emphasized the fact that the police had been the recipients of military garb, weaponry, technology, et cetera.
Not saying they werent there
Well of course, there is a whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change.
It was the slaves themselves and of course the abolitionist movement that led to the dismantling of slavery.
children’s crusade. Children were organized to face the high-power firehoses and the police, Bull Connor’s police in Birmingham. Of course, there were some who disagreed with allowing the children to participate at that level; even Malcolm X thought it was not appropriate to expose children to that amount of danger, but the children wanted to participate.
it was assumed that once Black people achieved political and economic power, there would be economic freedom for everyone, and we see that that’s not necessarily the case.
It is increasingly becoming, that is to say the issue of Palestine, is increasingly being incorporated into major social justice issues.
Of always foregrounding those connections so that people remember that nothing happens in isolation.
That 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.
It used to be the case that the struggles for freedom were seen to be male struggles.
