Lily’s Reviews > Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement > Status Update

“…but I am going to conclude by saying that the greatest challenge facing us as we attempt to forge international solidarities and connections across national borders is an understanding of what feminists often call “intersectionality”. Not so much intersectionality of identities, but intersectionality of struggles.

“The personal is political - not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We ourselves often do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited…”

“Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories.”

“Racial segregation was instituted in the aftermath of slavery, in the aftermath of the black radical reconstruction, in an attempt to manage free black people.”

The personal is political. What happens in our public lives is reflected in our private. There’s alot of injustice in the worlds and a lot of exploitation. We have to be brave to stand up against injustice. Because there’s a lot occurring to keep us subdued and passive and unable to change the injustices occurring in the world.

“Prisons are racism incarnate. As Michelle Alexander point out, they constitute the new Jim Crow. But also much more, as the lynchpins of the prison-industrial complex, they represent the increasing profitability of punishment. They represent the increasing global strategy of dealing with populations of people of colour and immigrant populations from the countries of the global south….”