Resistance and Hope Quotes

“I feel a little bitter that most non-disabled people do not have this dilemma of whether they will exchange their privacy to be seen as human. I am also aware that I am not alone in this experience, and that many marginalized people are put in the position of having to prove their humanity every day.”
― Alice Wong, Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People

“Activism has its own overcoming myth. You enter some activist space, Tumblr, a campus group, your neighborhood cultural center. You’re expected to make mistakes, but to eventually never mess up anyone’s pronoun, ever, to never accidentally use the wrong vocabulary, regardless of how educated you are, self-educated or formally. You’re expected to be on this linear progression of no longer making mistakes once you are politically conscious, radical, or involved enough. And if you do make a mistake (and things that are actually toxic or oppressive end up being conflated very easily with valid disagreements), it’s evidence there’s something deeply wrong with your character regardless of how you handle it, whether you try to be accountable, or whether you work to not repeat that harm again.”
― Alice Wong, Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People

“Resistance is dreaming about the end of law enforcement, courts and prisons as we know them. Hope flows from knowing that we are not bound by the rigid and relative confines of legislatures, courtrooms, or oval offices—that outer limits exist only if we accept them as real. Love is our relentless pursuit of real-life dreams. Freedom first takes root in our visions for a radically just space-time continuum; and triumph is earned when others slip into our envisioned realm of justice and stay awhile—at least until time, space, or both catch up. Liberation is conceived by our imagination, carried in our hearts, and birthed through our revolutionary madness.”
― Alice Wong, Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People

“After a decade of all-volunteer advocacy, I have come to view every incarceration as a missed opportunity to love and transform; as a loss of time, life, and dreams of our community; and as state violence. Some of our greatest assets and resources in this struggle are exiled from our communities and languishing in this nation’s labyrinth of violent institutions.”
― Alice Wong, Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People

“For a government that claims to seek to reduce and prevent violence, transformative and holistic measures like community conversations and community accountability should be at least a part of the solution.”
― Alice Wong, Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People

“We must have hope in the face of all that is going on, because without it, we will die. We will watch and do nothing while healthcare goes away, while education becomes utterly substandard, while families are ripped apart through deportation and bans, and while safety nets are snatched from the disabled and poor. We will watch and do nothing while this administration commits more and more outrageous injustices and leads us to war and annihilation.”
― Alice Wong, Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People

“Harsh retribution—which seemingly satisfied the state—actually damaged me, this young man, our families, and every marginalized community to which we belong. Furthermore, some ten years later, I still do not have closure and probably never will. Our criminal legal system claims to seek justice for victims and survivors of violence, but our voices are not centered unless we are acceptably violent enough to justify the state’s pre-ordained violent action; or white, wealthy, or abled enough for our dissent to actually matter.”
― Alice Wong, Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People

“How can we believe survivors and hold space for both of these people if they are in our community, in our neighborhood, in our organizing group, in our friends circle and not excuse abuse? What does it mean to do reparations on the individual level? What does it actually mean to hold yourself and others accountable? What does it mean to do accountability when the word accountability and literally every concept created in activism, advocacy, organizing, or social justice has at some point or another been twisted to abuse and harm? Who can’t be here?”
― Alice Wong, Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People

“You enter some activist space, Tumblr, a campus group, your neighborhood cultural center. You’re expected to make mistakes, but to eventually never mess up anyone’s pronoun, ever, to never accidentally use the wrong vocabulary, regardless of how educated you are, self-educated or formally.”
― Alice Wong, Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People