Britt Stern

“In the center of all these transformations is the fugitive slave. Winning her emancipation singly, in groups and en masse, stealing through dark swamps and across busy roads, dodging the slave catchers and outwitting police patrols, she moves unseen on the edges of history, changing it inexorably with her flight. To find herself, she must steal and abolish white property, must abolish herself-as-property. She strikes fear into the heart of white society because she reveals just how flimsy their regimes of property, power, and domination can be in the face of her jailbreak for freedom. This specter of slaves freeing themselves is American history’s first image of Black looters.”
― Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action

“happiness is not the natural state of mankind, and is never achieved from the outside in.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

“The United States of America is built on African slavery and Indigenous genocide. This simple fact is the premise from which any honest study of American history must begin.”
― Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action

“The emergence of reason and the subsequent reification of reason as the fundamental attribute of human nature is therefore completely premised on the creation of hierarchies of reasonable and unreasonable peo-ple. The enlightened, reasoned man can only exist in distinction to the (African, Indigenous, nonmale) person who lacks reason; the idea of universal humanity is premised on human difference from and opposition to the less- or nonhuman person, a racialized and racializing difference.”
― Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action