Quinn > Recent Status Updates

“Black-on-black crime is jargon, violence to language, which vanished the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel.”

“You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.”

“I am ashamed of how I acted that day, ashamed of endangering your body. But I am not ashamed because I am a bad father, a bad individual or ill mannered. I am ashamed that I made an error, knowing that our errors always cost us more.”

“All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to “be twice as good,” which is yo say “accept half as much.”

“For all your life, whenever you’ve had a question you’ve been able to type that question out on a keyboard, watch it appear in a space bordered by a corporate logo, & within seconds revel in the flood of potential answers. I still remember days when a song u loved would play on the radio & then disappear into nothing. For a young man like me the invention of the Internet was the invention of space travel.”

“Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have & you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves be4 seeing u killed by the streets that America made. Thats a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with moral authority.”

...And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.”

“The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies--the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects--are the product of democratic will...

“Hate gives identity. The ni**er, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the dream of being white, of being a man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe”

“‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct, and sometimes it is insidious. But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, ‘white people’ would cease to exist for want of reasons.”

..to see these two arms in relation- those who failed in the schools justified their destruction in the streets. The society could say, “he should have stayed in school,” and then wash its hands of him.”

“I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the school and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body. And I began..

“A society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.. it does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black...what matters is the system that makes your body breakable.”

“...the police departments of your country have been endowed with authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy.... the destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.”

...Who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.”

“Race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of name “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly get organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes this is the new idea at the heart of these new people..

“Feminism is not a scheme to deprive men but a campaign to liberate us all.”

“Rapes has always been portrayed as isolated in incidents due to anomalous perpetrators (or natural uncontrollable urges or the victim’s behavior), rather than a pattern whose causes are cultural.”

..’the tyranny of the quantifiable,’ of the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot: private profit over public good; speed & efficiency over enjoyment and quality; the utilitarian over the mysteries & meanings that are of greater use to our survival & to more than our survival, to lives that have some purpose & value that survive beyond us to make a civilization worth having.

“The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.”

“We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.”

“There’s something about how masculinity is imagined, about what’s praised and encouraged, about the way violence is passed on to boys that needs to be addressed.”

“...the usual guidelines in such situations put the full burden of prevention on potential victims, treating the violence as a given. There’s no good reason (and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators.”

“For the black-and-white protestors, women are reduced to little more than incubators. Their role is to produce babies, no matter what the circumstances. Where do their rights, their pursuit of happiness, their ambitions enter the equation? Why, like for the seed that falls, aren’t the conditions for growth considered?”

“To people like this young man, that tiny sac is a human being. To me that tissue represents potential, and the woman carrying it has to have the freedom and ability to nurture and grow that potential. Not every seed that falls from a pinecone becomes a tree. The soil has to be fertile; the climate and topography and timing have to be favorable. If those ingredients are wrong the potential growth never takes place.

“..the people who pay the greatest price in the abortion war are always the ones without power, without resources, without advocates, the most vulnerable of our culture. Poor women in the IS are 4x. more likely to have an unwanted pregnancy than affluent women. They are 5x more likely to have an unintended birth and 3x more likely to have an abortion. The correlation between poverty & unwanted pregnancy is stark”

“I often wonder if it were men who got pregnant, men who faced these wrenching personal difficulties, whether abortion would even be on the political radar. Would men be expected to compromise their futures, give up the prospect of college, lose professional opportunities, sacrifice their ambitions... to fatherhood? I suspect not.”