Elisa Smoczynski

“The greatest freedom I have now is that I no longer believe that anyone else can save my life.

--Erica Jong, quoted by bell hooks in Communion The Female Search for Love”
― Erica Jong

“A few early farmers conserved the soil - George Washington was one - but they were stray oddities. A few pioneers had naturalistic interests, but any revelation of such interests branded the holder of them as being peculiar or even undemocratic. The
mass rule then, as now, was: Conform and be dull.”
― J. Frank Dobie, The Voice of the Coyote

“Many unlearning racism workshops focus on helping white individuals to see that they too are wounded by racism and as a consequence have something to gain from participating in anti-racist struggle. While in some ways true, a construction of political solidarity that is rooted in a narrative of shared victimization not only acts to recenter whites, it risks obscuring the particular ways racist domination impacts on the lives of marginalized groups. Implicit in the assumption that even those who are privileged via racist hierarchy suffer is the notion that it is only when those in power get in touch with how they too are victimized will they rebel against structures of domination. The truth is that many folks benefit greatly from dominating others and are not suffering a wound that is in any way similar to the condition of the exploited and oppressed.
Anti-racist work that tries to get these individuals to see themselves as "victimized" by racism in the hopes that this will act as an intervention is a misguided strategy. And indeed we must be willing to acknowledge that individuals of great privilege who are in no way victimized are capable, via their political choices, of working on behalf of the oppressed. Such solidarity does not need to be rooted in shared experience. It can be based on one's political and ethical understanding of racism and one's rejection of domination.”
― bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation

“Conformist thinking is self-defeating because it knows only the categories of punishment and submission, but not the potential that lies in understanding. The image of the enemy must be maintained at all costs; for this reason, the "enemy" must never be humanized. Both the revolutionary and the conformist depend on the image of the enemy; they need it in order to rationalize their violence to maintain their positions.”
― Arno Gruen, The Insanity of Normality: Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness