Stakes Is High Quotes

“The problem is when progress becomes its own ideology—that is, when advocacy for incrementalism is seen as the astute and preferred mode of political transformation. It is never easy to win, but progress is also never sufficient. Incremental change keeps the grinding forces of oppression—death—in place. Actively advocating for this position is a moral failure.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“There are those of us who can retreat to a fantastical America, and those of us who are always here—stuck.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“He failed to appeal to the American ego, to be a cheerleader for American exceptionalism.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“The most insidious and remarkable quality of American mythmaking is the ability to swallow up the lives of those who stood in open rebellion to the American project and turn them into obedient symbols of American exceptionalism.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“It's not that I envy her vision of America. I would never hope to be so deluded. I envy the power of her narrative imagination. She has conjured an America, someplace in history, that is “great,” and so many people are convinced of its existence that they create greater suffering in the present for people who stand to gain nothing from this imaginary restoration.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“Individual safety and prosperity at the expense of solidarity can only ever replicate capitalist hierarchies and the violent means imposing them. If you view your emancipation as separate from mine, we will forever be locked in an unwinnable competition.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“..but the effect of this is that those who champion the lies are called patriots, while anyone who takes actual American history as its history is deemed a radical.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“But what this nostalgia tells me is not that Americans forget too easily. "We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing," Gore Vidal famously said, but this is only partially true. He neglected that the delusion is intentional. The preamble to our Constitution starts, "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union..." and it has been interpreted as an excuse for America's shortcomings. We are not perfect, but seek to be "more perfect." Our faults are not American, only the progress--ending slavery is American, the institution itself was not. Extending the vote to white women via constitutional amendment is American, denying them the vote for more than a century of the nation's existence was not. For the myth to hold, we can only ever view America as the sum of its best parts.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“refreshed Twitter every few minutes under the irrational belief that so long as I had a minute-to-minute update on the state of the world, then nothing truly catastrophic could happen.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“This thing, whether rendered crudely or poetically, is the misguided belief that America’s history possesses something better to which we can return. But it is not there. We have not been friends, but competitors. We have not practiced affection—at our absolute best we manage tolerance. We silence our better angels before turning them into familiar devils.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“Our preoccupation cannot be with how to make Ocasio-Cortez president but with how we fill the halls of power with all the Ocasio-Cortezes waiting in the wings.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“Abolition offers an alternative framework for thinking through how we care for everyone who is harmed, and for considering how to reduce and prevent harm from occurring. Prison is not a means of preventing violence, but for shifting it out of sight from polite society. In this way, it becomes harder to convince a society convinced of its own politeness that a confrontation with prison is necessary. Out of sight, and so on.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“the ignoble pursuit of status within a gendered hierarchy leaves all tactics of domination available to the in-group of power.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“justice is a proactive commitment to providing each person with the material and social conditions in which they can both survive and thrive as a healthy and self-actualized human being. This is not an easy thing to establish, as it requires all of us buying into the idea that we must take responsibility for one another. But it is the only form of a just world.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“the past, I have been accused of hating the police. And I do. Such an admission may be taken to mean that I hate each police officer as an individual whom I have judged unfairly on the basis of their occupation. But I hate the police the same as I hate any institution that exists as an obstruction to justice.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“We are asked to hold the people in uniform in high regard because they keep us safe, but never asked whether or not we actually feel safe or what we would need in order to feel safe. “Police are not public, nor good,” writes movement lawyer Derecka Purnell in Boston Review, if we genuinely consider the definition of “public” as encompassing all of us, which history shows we do not. The police are the enemies of black people, Latinx people, trans people, and poor people. Is it our duty to revere them, even as their presence conflicts with our freedom? After Ferguson? After Baltimore?”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“the mandates of progressive policing are exactly the same as those of authoritarian policing, which is to say that policing is policing no matter the adjective you put in front of it.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“Contrary to what personal finance charlatans would have us believe, poverty is not a mindset—it is the inevitable and necessary by-product of a system wherein life is only guaranteed to those who have wealth and wealth is distributed via ownership and not labor. Poverty is a capitalist’s main resource, as it ensures there will always be a class of people to exploit.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“It would be a tremendous shame for the wealthiest nation in human history to admit that the wealth it has built came at a dreadful cost to the majority of people who live here. It would reveal the lie of the whole system.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“They will call the police, who will arrest this person, and for a night or two they will have a place to sleep in a jail cell. The police cannot solve poverty, joblessness, and the housing crisis—the actual culprits in the lives of the homeless. But if we’ve deemed the homeless, not poverty, the problem, then what the police can do is make them disappear. The major tools the police carry are handcuffs and guns; they can arrest or kill. The police can go forth and round up the homeless, then place them in cages. And to grant them the authority, local governments can criminalize the existence of the homeless: they can criminalize sleeping outside, or criminalize panhandling, which begins to look a lot like the criminalization of vagrancy as part of the Black Codes in the era that ended Reconstruction. And then, our local governments can fund a separate police force for the subway system to punish turnstile jumpers, arrest women selling churros, and clear out more homeless people, while neighborhood associations ensure no new homeless shelters get built near or in affluent neighborhoods. The streets remain the only place for them to call home.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“The police are no solution, but they are, as it were, the final solution. It matters what you see as the problems in need of solving. Is it the people or the conditions? Is it blackness or anti-blackness? Is it poverty or the poor?”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“But with the propaganda machine churning on, the police, and the governments that direct them, are able to get buy-in from the very people they are meant to police. The community hears the gunshots, sees the addicts wandering hopelessly and the dope boys pondering their next move, grows fearful that a shouting match will turn ugly quickly, and they have been taught by teachers, counselors, television, movies, and the police themselves that the cops can solve this problem. So they call. There is no alternative. No one will even pay for them to have trash cans. How can a community deprived of the basics expect to receive the resources they need to no longer depend on police? They have, purposefully, been given nothing else.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“No matter what other responsibilities police have assumed, they have consistently inflicted violence on the most marginalized people in society and maintained the economic, political, and social dominance of the ruling class. When I say they have not strayed too far from these roots, I mean precisely that the main function of policing has not changed. It is still an institution built on the principle of using violence to ensure that people who are exploited by the ruling class are unable to assert any pressure on their oppressors. The”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“This is all bullshit, and once anyone encounters a police officer doing their actual job, they know it is bullshit. Police patrol and harass. They reluctantly answer questions better suited for town visitor centers. They enforce traffic laws at their discretion, or to shore up municipal budgets through the imposition of exorbitant fines. They introduce the potential for violence in response to calls about loud music. They arrest people who have disobeyed them and then make up the charges later. They dismiss the stories of rape victims; they side with domestic abusers. They commit rape and domestic abuse at higher rates than the rest of the population. They quell rebellions. They arrest freedom fighters. They shoot and kill with impunity.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“academics, media professionals, policymakers, presidents—excuse the presence of the police here, and in other hoods like this one, because it is their position that in order to stop the violence of the hood you must impose the violence of the state. The police are meant, from this view, to protect the people from themselves, to enforce the discipline their culture lacks.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“there is violence here, just as there is violence any place where the people are stripped of the means to build a meaningful life.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“The white supremacist political party chose a white supremacist to represent it in the presidential election. An institution created for the protection of white supremacy installed that white supremacist into the nation’s highest office.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“Nor are they synonymous, which is what the kneeling protests, at their most potent, reminded us. Whether or not they were “American” in nature is inconsequential if we, as Americans, have failed to provide that term with meaning beyond the delusions we pass off as national treasures.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“Dr. King’s treatment as an “infallible oracle” is not laziness; his perceived infallibility is related to the message he has been chosen to deliver. Reduced to an apolitical dreamer, he can be a tool to divert energy away from forming structural solutions to inequality and injustice while spreading grade-school-level bromides in favor of kindness.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“It is only logical, from the standpoint of the empire, to swallow up anything that may threaten its existence. Dissent is inevitable but need not be destructive. By co-opting the heroes of insurgence, the empire is able to bolster its constructed moral authority.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream