Joy James > Quotes

“Now in speaking like this, it doesn’t mean that we’re anti-white, but it does mean we’re anti-exploitation, we’re anti-degradation, we’re anti-oppression. And if the white man doesn’t want us to be anti-him, let him stop oppressing and exploiting and degrading us.”
― Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion

“We charge the American Government with genocide. In clear, unequivocal terms, we charge the American government with genocide against the captive Black people in America who are perpetually under siege.”
― Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion

“I’m not a Democrat, I’m not a Republican, and I don’t even consider myself an American. If you and I were Americans, there’d be no problem. Those Hunkies that just got off the boat, they’re already Americans; Polacks are already Americans; the Italian refugees are already Americans. Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren’t Americans yet.”
― Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion

“The announced function of the police, “to protect and serve the people,” becomes the grotesque caricature of protecting and preserving the interests of our oppressors and serving us nothing but injustice. They are there to intimidate blacks, to persuade us with their violence that we are powerless to alter the conditions of our lives. Arrests are frequently based on whims. Bullets from their guns murder human beings with little or no pretext, aside from the universal intimidation they are charged with carrying out. Protection for drug-pushers, and Mafia-style exploiters, support for the most reactionary ideological elements of the black community (especially those who cry out for more police), are among the many functions of forces of law and order. They encircle the community with a shield of violence, too often forcing the natural aggression of the black community inwards. [Frantz] Fanon’s analysis of the role of colonial police is an appropriate description of the function of the police in America’s ghettos.”
― Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion

“Furthermore, it is natural for caring people to sympathize with and support those who resist being oppressed. However, when the white anti-imperialists do get involved in the resistance and are placed in prison, a racist government can discourage other whites from aligning themselves with Blacks in struggle by the severe, at times cruel, treatment it inflicts on anti-imperialists.”
― Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion

“Reading and rereading this collection, I encounter the generosity, frailties and strengths, contradictions and contributions of “disappeared” rebels and heretics, of prophets and soldiers and healers. I am reminded of the noncanonical Gnostic Gospels suppressed by state religion; the heart of this work seems to pulse with the Gospel of Thomas (113): The disciples said to Him, “When will the Kingdom come?” [Jesus said,] “It will not come by waiting for it.”
― Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion

“There’s little difference between a lynching by the KKK and a police officer who puts a bullet in the head of a young Black man, and it happens time and time again.”
― Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion

“When we begin to get in this area, we need new friends, we need new allies. We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level—to the level of human rights. Whenever you are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. No one from the outside world can speak out in your behalf as long as your struggle is a civil-rights struggle. Civil rights comes within the domestic affairs of this country. All of our African brothers and our Asian brothers and our Latin-American brothers cannot open their mouths and interfere in the domestic affairs of the United States. And as long as it’s civil rights, this comes under the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam.”
― Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion

“He may be friendly, but he’s not your friend.”
― Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion

“We have an amazing legacy to study and to stitch together.”
― Joy James, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love

“Nina Simone sang “Sinnerman,” in which she begs the Lord to hide her (presumably from lynching) only to be told to “go to the Devil”; facing the Devil in abandonment, she cries to the Lord for power (presumably Black Power).”
― Joy James, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love

“Guevara asserted, “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”
― Joy James, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love

“Captive Maternals,” the agender or nongendered caretakers with diverse political agendas”
― Joy James, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love

“chastised for going “too left” in our search for social justice,”
― Joy James, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love

“With the declassed character of lumpenproletarians in mind, Marx had stated that they are as capable of “the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices, as of the basest banditry and the dirtiest corruption.”9 He emphasized the fact that the provisional government’s mobile guards under the Paris Commune—some 24,000 troops—were largely formed out of young lumpenproletarians from fifteen to twenty years of age. Too many Marxists have been inclined to overvalue the second part of Marx’s observation—that the lumpenproletariat is capable of the basest banditry and the dirtiest corruption—while minimizing or indeed totally disregarding his first remark, applauding the lumpen for their heroic deeds and exalted sacrifices.”
― Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion

“The world can see what goes on in the tombs of America as Black people are being slowly strangled and suffocated to death. . . .”
― Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion

“Revolutionary Love is the portal for lifelong education.”
― Joy James, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love

“A deep-seated ambivalence has always characterized the official response to the political prisoner. Charged and tried for the criminal act, his guilt is always political in nature. This ambivalence is perhaps best captured by Judge Webster Thayer’s comment upon sentencing Bartolomeo Vanzetti to fifteen years for an attempted payroll robbery: “This man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because he is an enemy of our existing institutions.” (The very same judge incidentally, sentences Sacco and Vanzetti3 to death for a robbery and murder of which they were manifestly innocent.)4 It is not surprising that Nazi Germany’s foremost constitutional lawyer, Carl Schmitt, advanced the theory which generalized this a priori culpability. A thief, for example, was not necessarily one who had committed an overt act of theft, but rather one whose character renders him a thief (wer nach seinem wesen ein Dieb ist).”
― Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion

“one tower falls the other follows do chickens come home to roost? enormity crashes dazed disbelief (chickens won’t roost here again pigeons either)”
― Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion