Veronica

“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

“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