THE SHORT/LONG GAME

"People live in the present. Everybody has to eat today, not tomorrow. Everybody has to sleep today, not tomorrow. Everybody has to do all those ordinary things today, and you can't tell people that they have to just wait another five or ten or twenty years, and it's going to get better somehow. Indeed that was a line of a lot of the historic antisystemic movements: "It will be better tomorrow; the sunshine is beyond the horizon." So you've got to worry about today, but you can't only worry about today. 

The problem is working out a strategy that combines a very short-run, immediate attempt to solve people's needs and a medium-run strategy of transforming the system. I think of the very short run as one of minimizing the pain. Minimizing the pain can be done in a thousand different ways. Some of it requires government action. Some of it requires popular action. But people need to have less pain immediately, and there are all sorts of ways of doing that. That doesn't transform the world, but it does meet people's needs." 

— Immanuel Wallerstein,  with Grace Lee Boggs at the US Social Forum, 2010

SAY MORE PLEASE

"There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

— Thomas Merton

REMEMBERING: GRACE LEE BOGGS
 

"History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories—triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectically—has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings." 

— Grace Lee Boggs

GATHER YOURSELF

"How do you get from connection to isolation? You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self."

— Jane Porter, "How Solitude Can Change Your Brain in Profound Ways"

REVOLUTION 

"Reading between lines of the FBI's individual reports on Baker's activities, one can almost hear the agents' queries, pregnant with all the biased stereotypes the agency held about dissidents: What is she up to? Who does she work for? What is her hidden agenda? The agents' own inability to answer such basic questions led one of them to conclude that Baker was "unstable." It was the very way that she looked at the world that made her so difficult to label. Since she saw revolution as a process, as a living experiment in creative vision and collaboration, very little, in her opinion, could be pre-determined. No blueprint could be rigidly adhered to. There was an organic interaction between the people involved in social change and those opposed; among different sectors, generations, and regions of the movement; between what we know and what we dare to dream. Although Baker had a definite worldview, which she articulated, enacted, and defended, there was fluidity and flexibility in the positions she took and the alliances she formed. Even the FBI could not pin her down."

— Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A National Democratic Vision

FINDING NEW (S)HEROES

"Somewhere along the way she recognized that her goal was not a single 'end' but rather an ongoing 'means,' that is, a process. Radical change for Ella Baker was about a presistent and protracted process of discourse, debate, consensus, reflection, and struggle. If larger and larger numbers of communities were engaged in such a process, she reasoned, day in and day out, year after year, the revolution would be well under way. Ella Baker understood that laws, structures, and institutions had to change in order to correct injustice and oppression, but part of the process had to involve oppressed people, ordinary people, infusing new meanings into the concept of democracy and finding their own individual and collective power to determine their lives and shape the direction of history. These were the radical terms that Ella Baker thought in and the radical ideas she found for with her mind and her body. Just as the 'end' for her was not a scripted utopia but another phase of struggle, the means of getting there was not scripted either. Baker's theory of social change and political organizing was inscribed in her practice. Her ideas were written in her work: a coherent body of lived text spanning nearly sixty years." 

— Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision

NOT IMPRESSED

"As Karen Olsen and Linda Shopes note, in our sensitivities to inequalities, academics may 'overestimate our own privilege, even our own importance, in the eyes of the people we interview.' But in fact, most interviewees, they observe, 'seem not especially overwhelmed, intimidated, or impressed with us at all.'" 

— Pamela Sugiman, "I Can Hear Lois Now"

NO EASY STORIES
 

"The story that racism belongs to poor people in the South is a little too easy, though. Just as not everybody up here, geographically and economically, is on the right side of the line, so not everyone down there is on the wrong side. But the story allows middle-class people to hate poor people while claiming to be on the side of truth, justice, and everything else good. 

"So, on the one hand, we have white people who hate black people. On the other hand, we have white people who hate other white people on the grounds that they hate black people. But that latter hatred accuses many wrongfully, and it serves as a convenient cover-up for the racism that is all around us. The reason it matters is that middle-class people despising poor people becomes your basic class war, and the ongoing insults seem to have been at least part of what has weakened the environmental movement in particular and progressive politics in general." 

— Rebecca Solnit, "One Nation Under Elvis" 

CURRENT MOOD

"The interpreter is a receptacle: constantly filling and constantly emptying. An empty signifier. A body that takes in other bodies, temporarily holding them before releasing them via language, thus making them accessible to other people’s awareness, if not understanding.

The role of mediator, receptacle, body-holding body is one that has been historically gendered “female,” and in practice a majority of working interpreters (and translators) are women. Our demand that interpreters be understood as instigators is feminist at its core. These “parrots” talk back; these secretaries write manifestos."

— Antena Language Justice Collaborative, "A Manifesto for Interpretation as Instigation" 

MUNICIPAL PLUNDER

"If policing in New York under Giuliani and Bloomberg was crime prevention tainted by racist presumptions, in other areas of the country ostensible crime prevention has mutated into little more than open pillage. When the Justice Department investigated the Ferguson police department in the wake of Michael Brown’s death, it found a police force that disproportionately ticketed and arrested blacks and viewed them “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.” This was not because the police department was uniquely evil—it was because Ferguson was looking to make money. “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,” the report concluded. These findings had been augured by the reporting of The Washington Post , which had found a few months earlier that some small, cash-strapped municipalities in the St. Louis suburbs were deriving 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from various fines for traffic violations, loud music, uncut grass, and wearing “saggy pants,” among other infractions. This was not public safety driving policy—it was law enforcement tasked with the job of municipal plunder.

"The argument that high crime is the predictable result of a series of oppressive racist policies does not render the victims of those policies bulletproof. Likewise, noting that fear of crime is well grounded does not make that fear a solid foundation for public policy.

"Deindustrialization had presented an employment problem for America’s poor and working class of all races. Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks. Mass incarceration “widened the income gap between white and black Americans,” writes Heather Ann Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan, “because the infrastructure of the carceral state was located disproportionately in all-white rural communities.”"

                          —  Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Never Marry Again in Slavery: The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration" 

UNSOUND PRIVILEGE

"Everyone talks about green cities now, but the concrete results in the affluent cities mostly involve curbside composting and tacking solar panels onto rooftops while residents continue to drive, to shop, to eat organic pears flown in from Argentina, to be part of the big machine of consumption and climate change. The free-range chickens and Priuses are great, but they alone aren't the adequate tools for creating a truly different society and ecology. The future, at least the sustainable one, the one in which we will survive, isn't going to be invented by people who are happily surrendering selective bits and pieces of environmentally unsound privilege. It's going to be made by those who had all that taken from them or never had it in the first place." 

— Rebbeca Solnit, "Detroit Arcadia"

IT'S PASSED THROUGH BLOOD

"The worst of white folks, I understood, wasn’t some gang of rabid white people in crisp pillowcases and shaved heads. The worst of white folks was a pathetic, powerful “it.” It conveniently forgot that it came to this country on a boat, then reacted violently when anything or anyone suggested it share. The worst of white folks wanted our mamas and grandmas to work themselves sick for a tiny sliver of an American pie it needed to believe it had made from scratch. IT was all at once crazy-making and quick to discipline us for acting crazy. It has an insatiable appetite for virtuoso black performance and routine black suffering. The worst of white folks really believed that the heights of black and brown aspiration should be emulation of itself. White Americans were wholly responsible for the worst of white folks, though they would make sure it never wholly defined them.

I didn’t know a lot as a seventh-grader in Mississippi, and I had far fewer words to describe what I actually knew, but the worst of white folks I knew far too well...It passed through blood."

— Kiese Laymon, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

EXCESS

"It is not unusual for us to feel that life is too much for us. And it is not unusual to feel that we really should be up to it; that there may be too much to cope with — too many demands — but that we should have the wherewithal to deal with it. Faced with the stresses and strains of everyday life it is easy now for people to feel that they are failing; and what they are failing at, one way or another, is managing the ordinary excesses that we are all beset by: too much frustration, too much bad feeling, too little love, too little success, and so on. One of the things people most frequently say in psychoanalysis is, ‘Perhaps I am overreacting, but . . .’; and one of the commonest complaints today is about feeling too much or feeling too little. I want to suggest that we are simply too much for ourselves, but that this too-muchness is telling us something important… My proposition is that it is impossible to overreact. That when we call our reactions overreactions what we mean is just that they are stronger than we would like them to be. In other words, we sometimes call ourselves and other people excessive as a way of invalidating or tempering the truths we tell ourselves or that other people tell us. It is impossible to overreact."

...

"Perhaps “excess” is a word we use to reassure ourselves that we can be something other than excessive. If we start off by being, at least some of the time, too much for other people, and become, in adolescence, definitively too much for other people, so much so that we have to leave them, and then become adults who are unavoidably too much for ourselves, what is to be done? Well, one thing that can be done is to find someone we are not too much for…"

— Adam Phillips, On Balance

THE WHISPER OF WINGS

"That the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil can shape the weather in Texas is a summation of chaos theory that is now an oft-repeated cliché. But there are billions of butterflies on earth, all flapping their wings. Why does one gesture matter more than another? Why this Facebook post, this girl with a drum?

Even to try to answer this you'd have to say that the butterfly is borne aloft by a particular breeze that was shaped by the flap of the wing of, say, a sparrow; and so behind causes are causes, behind small agents are other small agents, inspirations, and role models, as well as outrages to react against. The point is not that causation is unpredictable and erratic. The point is that butterflies and sparrows and young women in veils and an unknown twenty-year-old rapping Arabic and you yourself, if you wanted it, sometimes have tremendous power, enough to bring down a dictator, enough to change the world."

— Rebecca Solnit, "The Butterfly and the Boiling Point" 

WHAT IT IS NOT 

as a black woman.
a woman of color. 
writer. 
artist.
creative.
my work is not a literary zoo. 
for you to come observe. learn. about the animals. 
or
a space to come and dissolve into a plastic empathy.
or a space to publicly, loudly, dominantly flog your privileges.

nor is it
a warm indiscriminate. cavernous. lap to lay in. 
it is a boundary. 
i am a boundary. 

— unmammy 

— Nayyirah Waheed, Salt

ON KILLING THE DREAM: 

"I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planter, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos." 

— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

HOW TO LISTEN: 

"Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard— it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see: an old woman’s gonorrhea is connected to her guilt is connected to her marriage is connected to her children is connected to the days when she was a child. All this is connected to her domestically stifled mother, in turn, and to her parents’ unbroken marriage; maybe everything traces its roots to her very first period, how it shamed and thrilled her.

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes a seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response."

— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

AUTONOMY

"Men in Western cultures began redefining themselves and their relationship to the world in an effort to free themselves from the Divine Right of kings, oppressive myths, and religions. They would be separate, autonomous indiviudals, guided by reason alone...Because males set the standard, maturity in the New World became equated with autonomy and independence." 

All social relationships are distorted when it is believed that maturity requires cutting ties to others, when the assertion of self is thought to be at the expense of others (Hirsch 1989). A woman who holds the view that one advances at the expense of others will feel forced to choose between herself and others (Gilligan, 1982/1983). She can either assert herself and cause harm to others or she can stand in the background curtailing her own development so her children and husband might prosper. In contrast, those like Harriet Jacobs who assume they can advance themselves while lifting up others have a way of thinking that can empower everyone in the relationship (Debold, Wilson, and Malave, 1993)." 

— Mary Belenky, et al, A Tradition That Has No Name