Status Updates From Dünyayla Benim Aramda

“The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was improvised by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies-the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects-are the product of democratic will.”

“‘Slavery’ is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which some professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her…”