Sara Salem

“A survey was conducted in 1995 asking the following question: “Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me?” The startling results were published in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education. Ninety-five percent of respondents pictured a black drug user, while only 5 percent imagined other racial groups.39 These results contrast sharply with the reality of drug crime in America. African Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and they constitute roughly the same percentage today. Whites constituted the vast majority of drug users then (and now), but almost no one pictured a white person when asked to imagine what a drug user looks like. The same group of respondents also perceived the typical drug trafficker as black.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.”
― C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

“Property-owners are the most energetic flag-waggers and patriots in every country, but only so long as they enjoy their possessions: to safeguard those they desert God, King and Country in a twinkling.”
― C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

“Pointing to a trend in Western democracies, Agamben posits that the declaration of an emergency state of exception itself has gradually been replaced by a “generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government” (2003/2005, 14), that is, the state of exception or emergency has become integrated in the normal functioning of the state.”
― Nicholas De Genova, The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement