Hil

“I'm not trying to romanticize or fetishize the past, but the simple fact is that for centuries, throughout the world, we lived communally. Having individual families siloed off from one another behind fences, out of sight and out of mind, is a relatively recent social structure that we accept. This model has been forced upon us, at a steep cost to parents and children.”
― Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

“To learn from those who try to intervene in the reproduction of something is to learn about reproduction. To stop a system from being reproduced, you have to stop it from working. You have to throw a wrench in the works or to become, to borrow Sarah Franklin’s (2015) terms, “wenches in the works.” When you throw your body into the system to try to stop it from working, you feel the impact of how things are working. We learn how those who try to stop a culture from being reproduced are stopped. But in learning this, we also learn that reproduction is not inevitable, nor is it smooth, despite the failure to stop something from working.”
― Sara Ahmed, Complaint!

“Despite all the positive psychological attributes of hatred we have outlined, hatred destroys finally the core of the life of the hater. While it lasts, burning in white heat, its effect seems positive and dynamic. But at last it turns to ash, for it guarantees a final isolation from one’s fellows. It blinds the individual to all values of worth, even as they apply to himself and to his fellows. Hatred bears deadly and bitter fruit. It is blind and nondiscriminating.”
― Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

“A complaint becomes part of you, part of who you become, that problem child, you can’t shed it; you can’t shed her, having done it, made it, that complaint, “you cannot go back.” Perhaps it is a promise: having become a complainer, you cannot unbecome a complainer. Promises don’t always feel promising. That a complaint can take over your life, become your life, even become you, can be what makes complaint so exhausting.27 When making a complaint changes your sense of self, it changes your sense of the world.”
― Sara Ahmed, Complaint!