Britt Stern

“Because stories are important.
People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.
Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power.
Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling...stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

“Frederick Douglass spent some of his bondage working as a ship caulker in Baltimore and, like many others, deceived his enslaver about how much he was actually making, thus secreting funds for his escape. Many of these workers lived miles distant from their enslavers- indeed, it is precisely these urban communities of relatively independent Black people that would lead to the earliest development of police departments, as gangs of slave catchers evolved into formalized slave patrols designed to keep these "slave quarters" under surveillance and control.”
― Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action

“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