Nadav David

“Ain’t nothing in the world worse than looking at your children drowning, knowing ain’t nothing you can do because scared that if you get to trying to save them, they might see that you can swim either.”
― Kiese Laymon , Heavy

“Perhaps one of the greatest harms the criminal justice system has done is persuaded us that we do not know how to solve the problems that arise between and amongst us. We have been taught that our experience is inconsequential in comparison to the evidence the "experts" present, and that the strategies we gravitate towards instinctively--calling each other's families first instead of the police, addressing the underlying causes of people's behavior, requiring people to give back to those they harmed--are somehow not only wrong, but socially irresponsible.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“That transformation requires both personal change and change in structures: to be most durable, people have to not want to and not be able to cause the same kinds of harm again. Ensuring that the harm will not recur therefore requires a realignment of power, from those who have caused harm to those who have been harmed. With mass incarceration and violence, that realignment involves relocating the authority to define and secure safety so that it shifts from the systems that have held that power to the communities that are most impacted. It means not only shrinking systems but developing solutions that stand to displace them. And it means building political power to protect those changes from backsliding and backlash. The people whose lives are at stake will need to have the durable collective power to choose, implement and sustain solutions.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“As a living creature I am part of two kinds of forces--growth and decay, sprouting and withering, living and dying, and at any given moment in our lives, each one of us is actively located somewhere along a continuum between those two forces.”
― Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light