Bethany Elizabeth

“What racialised stop and search is about, in London at least, is letting young black boys and men know their place in British society, letting them know who holds the power and showing them that their day can be held up even in a nice ‘liberal’ area like Camden in a way that will never happen to their white friends, if they still have any left by the time they have their first encounter with the police. It is about social engineering and about the conditioning of expectations, about getting black people used to the fact that they are not real and full citizens, so they should learn to not expect the privileges that would usually accrue from such a status. Racialised stop and search is also a legacy of more direct and brutal forms of policing the black body in the UK, from back in the days before political correctness.”
― Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

“Decolonizing knowledge shouldn’t put us in the position of only producing knowledge as a reaction to Western knowledge. Our existence should not become one in which everything we produce is to justify our intellectual existence vis-à-vis the West. It means to produce what we see as important, fit, and nurturing to our communities, countries, and cultures, in separation from the West and its colonial and imperial agenda. This way, we will ensure to not waste our energy in simply reacting to the West to justify the value of our contribution to knowledge.”
― Louis Yako

“Thus whiteness has always functioned as a tool of domination, as Charles Mills puts it: ‘Whiteness is a phenomenon unthinkable in a context where white does not equal power at some structural level.”
― Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

“History is never dead. It crawls its way into our present and shapes our future.”
― J.U. Scribe, Roman Identity