D Reznik > D's Quotes

“The challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression . Rather, it is to identify and dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire

“Despite the important of antiracist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the prison system.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

“When Black women stand up— as they did during the Montgomery Bus Boycott—as they did during the Black liberation era, earth-shaking changes occur.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“Movements are most powerful when they begin to affect the vision and perspective of those who do not necessarily associate themselves with those movements.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“The majority of people who are in prison are there because society has failed them.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“Black history is indeed American history, but it is also world history.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“Despite the important gains of antiracist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the prison system.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

“Racism provides the fuel for maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of the prison-industrial complex.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“we must not be seduced into believing that improving the system is the same as dismantling or transforming it. As Angela Davis has explained, if we accept uncritically the notion that prisons offer an answer, and that all we must do is improve our so-called justice systems, we evade the “responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“The lessons are clear: changing white hearts or training more cops won’t do. To put out the fire this time requires dismantling the entire state and corporate machinery of violence.”
― Robin D.G. Kelley

“The systems responsible for our oppression cannot be the same systems responsible for our liberation.”
― Derecka Purnell, Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom

“Abolition, I have learned, is a bigger idea than firing cops and closing prisons; it includes eliminating the reasons people think they need cops and prisons in the first place.”
― Derecka Purnell, Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom

“Abolition is about abolishing the conditions under which prison became the solution to problems, rather than abolishing the buildings we call prisons.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore

“Instead of asking whether anyone should be locked up or go free, why don’t we think about why we solve problems by repeating the kind of behavior that brought us the problem in the first place?”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore

“There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against Black people.”
― Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

“White supremacy does not thrive in spite of the menacing infrastructure of US criminalization and militarism—it thrives because of it.”
― Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

“All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.”
― bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism

“One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..”
― bell hooks, Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem

“There is light in darkness, you just have to find it.”
― bell hooks

“Our freedom is sweet. It will be sweeter when we are all free.”
― bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism