Brian Earp

“Western interest in “other” women seems highly selective—and, in some cases, only tenuously connected to feminism. George W. Bush notoriously supported the contemporaneous war on US women’s access to abortion and contraception. He rarely used his platform to criticize harmful traditional practices that affect U.S. women.”
― Serene J. Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic

“Westerners often assume that what is universally valuable for women just is (an idealized form of) the Western way of life. In many theoretical discussions, this peculiar narrow and ethnocentric variant of universalism is what is meant by “universalism.”
― Serene J. Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic

“what gets defined as crime, and who gets surveilled and punished, generally has more to do with the politics of race and class than the harm that any particular behavior or activity causes. As Alec Karakatsanis observes in Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System, people with race and class privilege are generally shielded from criminal prosecution, even though their crimes often cause far greater harm than the crimes of the poor. The most obvious example is the prosecutorial response to the financial crisis of 2008 and the related scandals: “Employees at banks committed crimes including lying to investigators and regulators, fraudulently portraying junk assets as valuable assets, rate-rigging, bribing foreign officials, submitting false documents, mortgage fraud, fraudulent home foreclosures, financing drug cartels, orchestrating and enabling widespread tax evasion, and violating international sanctions.” The massive criminality caused enormous harm. African Americans lost over half their wealth due to the collapse of real estate markets and the financial crisis. By the end of the crisis, in 2009, median household wealth for all Americans had declined by $27,000, leaving almost 44 million people in poverty. While some banks were eventually prosecuted (and agreed to pay fines that were a small fraction of their profits), the individuals who committed these crimes were typically spared. Despite engaging in forms of criminality that destroyed the lives and wealth of millions, they were not rounded up, dragged away in handcuffs, placed in cages, and then stripped of their basic civil and human rights or shipped to another country. Their mug shots never appeared on the evening news and they never had to wave goodbye to their children in a courtroom, unable to give them a final embrace.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“The safest communities are not the ones with the most police, prisons, or electronic monitors, but the ones with quality schools, health care, housing, plentiful jobs, and strong social networks that allow families not merely to survive but to thrive. What our communities need and deserve is no mystery.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness