Taking Sides Quotes

“I want to love and rage, mourn and struggle, with millions of others, against this killing machine, until we shut it down for good--replacing it with social goodness that we can barely yet envision, and armed with do-it-ourselves, steel-hard solidarity as shield, aid, humanity, ethic.

Solidarity, as Weapon and Practice, versus Killer Cops and White Supremacy”
― Cindy Milstein, Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism

“The state is not our ally. White feminism is not our ally either, because discussing violence against women without discussing gender violence within a colonial context has no meaning for me. Gender violence and murdered and missing indigenous women are a symptom of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and genocide. They are symptoms of the dispossession of indigenous peoples from our territories.”
― Cindy Barukh Milstein, Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism

“Decolonization is as much a process as a goal. It requires a profound re-centering of indigenous worldviews in our movements for political liberation, social transformation, renewed cultural kinships, and the development of an economic system that serves rather than threatens our collective life on this planet.”
― Cindy Barukh Milstein, Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism

“The pieces in "Taking Sides" do not agree with each other. That isn't accidental. There are no easy or singular responses or resolutions to white supremacy, to name one brutal adversary, nor uncomplicated ones. These essays each wrestle in their own way with the dilemma of how to thwart murderous forms of social control while retaining our humanity. In doing so, they form a dialogue that models how we might intelligently converse and act in comradely concert with each other outside the pages of this book.”
― Cindy Milstein, Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism

“All these iterations have been political interventions: as provocation, as direct action to discomfort, as challenge to what I consider nonliberatory praxis. They are also an invitation to constructively debate the many thorny questions for which none of us have the answers, to hone our strategies and tactics within social struggles while tangibly looking out for each other. They serve, too, as an ethical compass, supplying directionality to walk fiercely, militantly, and collectively toward our many dreams of egalitarian social transformation.”
― Cindy Milstein, Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism

“When there is more concern for white sports fans in the vicinity of a riot than the black people facing off with police, there is mounting justification for the rage and pain of black communities in this country. Acknowledging”
― Cindy Milstein, Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism

“to loathe the United States of America and capitalism, to want them destroyed, means the task set in front of us is to attack and abolish the racial order that has enabled these beasts. The”
― Cindy Milstein, Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism

“Indigenous struggle cannot simply be accommodated within other struggles; it demands solidarity on its own terms. The”
― Cindy Milstein, Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism

“Political change does not, and never has, come about through peaceful protest alone.”
― Cindy Milstein, Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism