Madeleine

“If we use the existing framework or model—the established mindset—to articulate a “solution” to a problem that that model sustains, in what way are we “dismantling”?”
― Aph Ko, Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters

“Let's use our exclusion and invisibility as a power to create impermeable spaces for ourselves, unburdened by the ridiculous and biased premises of the dominant class. Let's use our erasure from this rotten-to-the-core Western notion of humanity to build up a different “new world,” one that is not defined in terms of dichotomies or hierarchies or emotional death—but centered on love: one in which we accept ambiguity and difference, grounded in an expansive, limitless “we.” We are at the center of a radical shift taking place in pro-animal discourse precisely because, upon self-reflection, we can see that our struggle is their struggle. I don't mean this symbolically. I mean this literally.”
― Aph Ko, Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters

“Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Part of activism is finding yourself in a new space of confusion, allowing yourself to step into new conceptual terrain. When you abandon commonly held oppressive beliefs, you might not exactly know what to do afterward, and that's where more activists need to be.”
― Aph Ko, Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters