Lily > Recent Status Updates

I don’t think I’ve ever read a story where romantic love isn’t a part of the plot, even if it’s a measly side plot. The fact that Kaikeyi’s life’s focus is on herself, her purpose, and what brings her fulfilment is so refreshing, and so needed. She doesn’t feel that’s she’s unfulfilled or unhappy in life without the deep, passionate often lust-based love media sells us.

“In helping one woman, I had in fact helped myself.”

“…but I am going to conclude by saying that the greatest challenge facing us as we attempt to forge international solidarities and connections across national borders is an understanding of what feminists often call “intersectionality”. Not so much intersectionality of identities, but intersectionality of struggles.

“It’s interesting that in this era of global capitalism the corporations have learned how to do that: the corporations have element how to access aspects of our lives that cause us to often express our innermost dreams in terms of capitalist commodities. So we have internalized exchange value in ways that would have been entirely unimaginable…”

“The personal is political - not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We ourselves often do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited…”

“Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories.”

“Racial segregation was instituted in the aftermath of slavery, in the aftermath of the black radical reconstruction, in an attempt to manage free black people.”

The personal is political. What happens in our public lives is reflected in our private. There’s alot of injustice in the worlds and a lot of exploitation. We have to be brave to stand up against injustice. Because there’s a lot occurring to keep us subdued and passive and unable to change the injustices occurring in the world.

“Prisons are racism incarnate. As Michelle Alexander point out, they constitute the new Jim Crow. But also much more, as the lynchpins of the prison-industrial complex, they represent the increasing profitability of punishment. They represent the increasing global strategy of dealing with populations of people of colour and immigrant populations from the countries of the global south….”

It’s important to look at things from an intersectional lens, or when assessing something to look at it from different or all-encompassing angles. For ex. The treatment of incarcerated women reveals a lot about the overarching system Vs. Just looking at it from the treatment of incarcerated men, but also women of colour in prison, men of colour in prison and intersections of gender and sexuality.

Author encourages people “to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as normal.” Because prisons are considered normal and it takes a lot to persuade people to think otherwise.

Davis speaks about the importance of dialogue, of continued conversation and a robust vocabulary in defining racism and racist violence otherwise changes such as abolishing slavery can be misconstrued as resolving racism entirely without acknowledging that such changes haven’t rectified “cultural and structural elements of slavery [which] are still with us.”

“Now the attack on Assata incorporates the logic of the very terrorism with which they have falsely charged her. What might they expect to accomplish, other than causing new generations of activists to recoil in fear? The FBI is attempting to persuade people, it seems to me, who are the grandchildren of Assata’s generation - and mine as well - to turn away from struggles to end police violence…”

“So I’d like to point out that individual memories are not nearly as long as the memories of institutions, and especially repressive institutions. The FBI is still haunted by the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover. And the CIA and the ICE are institutions that have active and vivid memories of the mass organized struggles to end racism, to end war, to overthrow capitalism.”

“For example, those who assume that because slavery was legally abolished in the nineteenth century, it was thereby relegated to the dustbin of history, fail to recognize the extent to which cultural and structural elements of slavery are still with us.”

“And then I realized it wasn’t about me at all; it wasn’t about the individual at all. It was about sending a message to large numbers of people whom they thought they could discourage from involvement in the freedom struggles at that time.”