Sara Salem

“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

“Where we find happiness teaches us what we value rather than simply what is of value.”
― Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness

“The process occurs in two stages. The first step is to grant law enforcement officials extraordinary discretion regarding whom to stop, search, arrest, and charge for drug offenses, thus ensuring that conscious and unconscious racial beliefs and stereotypes will be given free rein. Unbridled discretion inevitably creates huge racial disparities. Then, the damning step: Close the courthouse doors to all claims by defendants and private litigants that the criminal justice system operates in racially discriminatory fashion. Demand that anyone who wants to challenge racial bias in the system offer, in advance, clear proof that the racial disparities are the product of intentional racial discrimination—i.e., the work of a bigot. This evidence will almost never be available in the era of colorblindness, because everyone knows—but does not say—that the enemy in the War on Drugs can be identified by race. This simple design has helped to produce one of the most extraordinary systems of racialized social control the world has ever seen.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“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in Western democracies, Agamben posits that the declaration of an emergency state of exception itself has gradually been replaced by a “generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government” (2003/2005, 14), that is, the state of exception or emergency has become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