Sandy Chi Kim

“This is a state of joyfulness inside the struggle—an energy that keeps us in motion, a breathing that keeps us laboring, even inside the pain of labor.”
― Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

“Loving ourselves is frontline social justice work. Audre Lorde said: “Caring for myself is not an act of self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” And bell hooks wrote, “I have seen that we cannot fully create effective movements for social change if individuals struggling for that change are not also self-actualized or working towards that end.” Without loving ourselves, our other efforts to love fail. When asked why we should practice radical care for ourselves, Angela Davis responded: “Longevity.” “As we struggle, we are attempting to presage the world to come,” she said. “If we don’t start practicing collective self-care now, there is no way to imagine, much less reach, a time of freedom.” That means finding ways to breathe life into the world we want, here and now.”
― Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

“I want to talk about language, form, and changing the world. The question that faces billions of people at this moment, one decade shy of the twenty-first century, is: Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths? The persistent concern of engaged artists, of cultural workers, in this country and certainly within my community, is, What role can, should, or must the film practitioner, for example, play in producing a desirable vision of the future? And the challenge that the cultural worker faces, myself for example, as a writer and as a media activist, is that the tools of my trade are colonized. The creative imagination has been colonized. The global screen has been colonized. And the audience—readers and viewers—is in bondage to an industry. It has the money, the will, the muscle, and the propaganda machine oiled up to keep us all locked up in a delusional system—as to even what America is. We are taught to believe, for example, that there is an American literature, that there is an American cinema, that there is an American reality. There is no American literature; there are American literatures.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations

“The way we make change is just as important as the change we make.”
― Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love