Prison is the only form of public housing that the government has truly invested in over the past 5 decades
For me, self-care is a lesson I'm still learning. But it begins with space away from the heaviness of life. I now take time to play, laugh, and, every once in awhile, sleep.
We live in a world where black humanity is a relatively new idea.
Nothing lasts forever, whether it's Greece, Rome or the British Empire. It doesn't mean that America has to end. The country could be reshaped and reimagined in a way that is even more democratic and less imperial in nature. We're trying to radically reshape the nation in ways that are more just and fairer. That's what I mean when I say that empires eventually fall. I'm not calling for the end of America. I'm just calling for a reimagination of its democratic possibilities.
Part of why I wrote my book was so that we could focus on the structural and systemic reasons behind social misery. Changed hearts and minds are important. But they do little against the backdrop of a system that needs to exploit people and labor to survive. I'm more interested in changed systems than changed hearts.
We must talk about how sexism and patriarchy operate in conjunction with state violence. Until we're honest about that, and do something to resist, we're complicit in the persistence of oppression.
There's a long history of saying certain people shouldn't be voting. And, unfortunately, the people who are often left out of these conversations are people who are black and brown.
When they say accountability, they mean surveillance and standardization.
I'm not defending the Trump vote. I think they're making a bad choice. But I'm saying the bad choice isn't one out of pure ignorance, and I think it's too easy. And it plays into cliches about, you know, elitist liberals to say, oh, these Trump voters - if they knew more, they would do better. And it's like, well, maybe they would do better if we had a legitimate set of policies in place that doesn't encourage the kind of gross radicalization that has happened under the Trump candidacy. So for me, it's all about developing a richer conversation.
The Trump voter isn't just an ignorant white guy in the South that if he were more educated would vote differently. The Trump voter is also someone who is dealing with an entirely new economy that his father, grandfather or grandmother didn't have to face 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago.
The hoodies themselves aren't criminal. White people wear hoodies all the time!
If we begin by the conversation that some people shouldn't be encouraged to come to the polls, that does nothing to help us. And just as a practical matter, when we don't encourage voters to come out to the polls, the people who stay home quickest are black and brown folk.
If you look at literacy tests in the South, for example, they were absurdly difficult and didn't measure literacy. They were simply measuring whether or not you were black. So at every moment when we've said, hey, we don't want certain people to vote because they are not educated enough, it is often simply become a way of excluding black and brown people.
We have to convince the white worker that they have something to gain by forming a solidarity politics with black workers because everything that's happened over the last three to 400 years in America has divided the white and the black worker.
