Veronica > Veronica's Quotes

“Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.”
― Emma Goldman

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Nonprofits compete to show that they are the best organization to win a grant. To win, nonprofits want to make their work look legitimate to the funder, which means working according to the funder’s beliefs about the causes of and solutions for a particular problem rather than challenging those beliefs. For example, the funder may favor nonprofits that make sobriety a condition of receiving a spot in a homeless shelter, because rich people would rather believe that homelessness is caused by poor people’s drug use than that it is caused by a capitalist housing market.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis

“The false separation of politics and injustice from ordinary life—and the idea that activism is a kind of lifestyle accessory—is demobilizing to our movements, hides the root causes of injustice, and keeps us passive and complicit.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis

“Rich people's control of nonprofit funding keeps nonprofits from doing work that is threatening to the status quo, or from admitting the limits of their strategies.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“When we feel bad, we often automatically decide that either we are bad or another person is bad. Both of these moves cause damage and distort the truth, which is that we are all navigating difficult conditions the best we can, and we all have a lot to learn and unlearn.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“Conflict is inevitable, and our allies are not disposable. We need to fess up to mistakes when we make them, and apologize when we’ve hurt someone, but we also need to abandon a culture of resorting to public humiliation, exile, and shunning of anyone who slips up.”
― Sim Kern, Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation

“And I’m willing to bet that if, right this moment, you put down this book and ask someone—whether your mom or your roommate or the person who delivers your mail—what they believe is the key to the American Dream, to the promise of equal access to a good life, odds are good that education would be somewhere at the center of their equation. But beneath the shining castle of that American Dream lie two cornerstones that irrevocably shaped the social fabric of this nation: the genocide and displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the institution of chattel slavery that held African people in bondage. We cannot truly understand the United States of the present without understanding these two original sins of the past and their structural afterlives, which lie at the basis of what we even understand race to be or to mean.[3] And the schoolhouse, that most venerable and beloved image of American aspiration, hasn’t rested angelically on the sidelines, uninvolved with the construction of racial hierarchy. Rather, it has played a central role in furthering the work begun by slavery and settler colonialism.”
― Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

“when I say “racism is a technology,” I mean that racism is something invented by humans that creates a hierarchical pattern that is then applied or enacted systematically in various contexts. Those patterns are not static; they are ever shifting, historically and geographically contingent. Categories are made, challenged, erased, and remade. Generally, those with the most power in a given society consciously and unconsciously build the walls of racial hierarchy in the places that suit them best in their time. In response, folks at the grass roots also shift and shape racial identity through reflection and resistance.”
― Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

“For White students, schools have been intended to provide unified leadership for a unified nation. For Black students, schools have been aimed at establishing a class of subservient laborers. And for Native students, schools have been designed to normalize that vision which Jefferson painted as inevitable: total disappearance.”
― Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

“World-ending and world-making can occur, are occurring, have always occurred, simultaneously. Given that racial and ecological violence are interwoven and inextricable from one another, more now than ever, Black and Indigenous communities—who are globally positioned as “first to die” within the climate crisis—are also on the front lines of world-making practices that threaten to overthrow the current (death-making) order of things. Put otherwise, our communities, quite literally the post-apocalyptic survivors of world-endings already, are best positioned to imagine what this may be.[41]”
― Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

“Building power through collective struggle means that when we band together in groups of people who share many things in common—not everything, but many things—and we decide we want to work toward something, the very process of doing that is the practice of making the world we want to live in. In building the relationships we need to topple an unjust world, we are also strengthening the muscles we need to care for one another; we are stitching together microcosms of the world that will replace the one we have.”
― Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

“But poor Black people and poor Native people are not poor by accident. Our peoples have been poor because the United States needed us to be poor—needed to steal from us, needed to make that stealing morally permissible by belittling and dehumanizing us, needed to normalize and naturalize that poverty as a built-in fixture.”
― Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

“The problem is, in the United States, wealth inequality is a feature, not a bug. At its foundations, there is no American capitalism without slavery and settler colonialism. The accrual of wealth through capitalism was never meant for Black and Native people’s participation, any more than cattle can “participate” in the work of a slaughterhouse. Rather, at the origins of the United States, capitalism held roles for Black and Native people that were purely extractive: Taking bodies. Taking babies. Taking land. While cheerleaders striving for an “inclusive” capitalist system can herald individual successes, we have to judge a system by its averages, not by its exceptions—those who happen to stand out as great athletes, artists, or entrepreneurs.”
― Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

“[My school] feels like a prison, to tell you the truth. ’Cuz you have to stay in the classroom, use the bathroom when they tell us, eat lunch when they tell us, it’s like a jail…. That’s why kids act bad. They feel like they trapped in here.[20] Dewayne’s observation echoes a point made by Foucault in his classic Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, which you’ll remember from chapter 4. Through practices like those Dewayne describes, the human being becomes less a spirit animated by agency and more a “body as object and target of power,” a thing to be “manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys [and] responds.”[21] In his everyday interactions in the building, Dewayne is reminded that his body is not his own. Necessary human functions like eating and using the bathroom can only be conducted with the approval and surveillance of those in a position of authority. Through these efforts, students are transformed into what Foucault calls “docile bodies”—bodies that can be “subjected, used, transformed, and improved” in ways that are endorsed by those in power. This process requires “uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the activity rather than its result”—think of students completing meaningless busywork where the quality of the outcome is of no consequence, only the fact that they are sitting still and doing it—“and is exercised according to a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement.”[22]”
― Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

“you think about it, our easy reliance on carceral logics in schools is especially sad. After all, shouldn’t schools—allegedly places dedicated to learning, nurturing, and understanding child development—be the first place where it occurs to us to address problems through care, compassion, and gentle inquiry rather than through punishment and containment? To the contrary, Black and Native people have been criminalized—labeled “dangerous people”—in schooling spaces throughout history. Like a perpetual motion machine, this allows carceral logics to sustain themselves: school becomes the place where they are routinized and made acceptable beyond questioning at an early age, impressing upon both children and the adults charged with caring for them that this is the only way things can possibly work. That normalization is cast upon the rest of our society, which in turn fails to condemn everyday acts of punishment and disposal enacted against children because these acts are seen as inevitable necessities.”
― Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism