Brady Hayes

“The 1 percent have a vast armory of material resources and political special forces, but the 99 percent have an army.”
― Jane F. McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age

“I had learned that blood alone does not determine who family is. Home is a feeling, a sense of security and belonging. If you have people who love and care about you, you have a home.”
― Cassidy Hutchinson, Enough

“It’s unfair that we can’t just be regular students here like everyone else,” I argued. “We’re the ones having sleepless nights while trying to get the administration to support us. But that is exactly what the Confederate flag bearer wants—for us to be so distracted that we fail our classes and reinforce the stereotype that we can’t cut it in a place like Harvard.” I then referenced a quote from Toni Morrison, who three years earlier had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved, her devastatingly lyrical novel about a formerly enslaved woman choosing freedom on her own terms. More than a decade before that, in a 1975 lecture about the American Dream that Morrison gave at Portland State University, the author had cautioned that Black people needed to take care not to get turned aside by racism. “The function, the very serious function of racism…is distraction,” she had told her audience. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms, and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” Thankfully, my friends heard what Toni Morrison sought to convey. From that day forward, we became more purposeful in how we showed up for rallies and protests, advocating for the causes we supported in between attending classes and study sessions, and refusing to allow our necessary activism to undermine our academic success. As Antoinette put it, “Our backs got straight, we faced forward, our stride was sure, because once we recognized the true toll of that Confederate flag, not just on our psyche but also our work, we were determined to get the last laugh.”
― Ketanji Brown Jackson, Lovely One: A Memoir