Emily M’s Reviews > Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World—And How You Can, Too > Status Update

“As they started looking into the scientific theories around emergence and emergent properties, Weaver started finding stringing similarities between how smaller entities interacting…in nature can have much larger, and surprising, outcomes, and what they saw in decentralized movement work.”
As a biologist - love to see it!

“Academia itself is highly problematic in the way it looks at race, Blackness, and Africana..But Black academics have been able to access history and information around Blackness that has been deliberately kept out of public schools and away from the general public…often white supremacy was able to weaponize this lack of information.”

“Accessible, public education is a necessity for our society…we have educators fighting every day to reduce harm to students of color and to create the safety needed to nurture true learning…knowing that there will always be limits on what they can accomplish, and that there will likely always be a steep price to pay for their efforts.”

“We need hope, and its daughters, courage and anger, if we’re going to be able to save our communities from environmental injustice and the climate crisis. The protesters in Warren County* took on a system that seemed much more powerful than them, and at first, it seemed like they had lost. But they gave birth to a movement more powerful than anyone could have imagined.”
*Against PCBs

“It’s going to take courage and cultural humility to shift our focus to the real causes of environmental injustice, and how we contribute to that by upholding harmful systems. It will require us to challenge capitalist ideas of wealth and abundance that are based on individual ownership and the accumulation…We can start by listening to those who have long practiced alternative systems…of land stewardship.”

“Environmental issues are racial justice issues. BIPOC communities are often the first affected, and almost always the worst affected, by environmental injustice - and that’s by design. If we all shared an equal burden for our ravages of the environment, people might be compelled to do something about them. Further, environmental injustice is often perpetrated by the same powers behind racial and economic injustice”

"Recent events in larger Black liberation spaces had underlined a key gap in our liberation work that was leading to infighting, distrust, recrimination, and other harm: a seeming lack of focus on how we treat one another in our communities today. Richie wondered What are we building together right now that models the world we want to see? We know what we're fighting against, but what are we fighting FOR?"

“As much as many would like to think of labor and union history as a story of workers coming together for the rights of all, the truth is that white workers have often chosen race and their own positions of racial power over the best interests of the union…we must be willing to face that and apply anti-racist and abolitionist practices to labor and union organizing.”

“It all began with labor. The need to work this large piece of stolen land, the need to expand across a continent, the need to maintain social and political control, the need to preserve as much profit as possible from what was so violently taken, the need to justify that theft. It all created a story of race and a social, economic, and political need for racism.”

“Macro social work looks beyond an individual and the challenges they seem to present, and instead looks to society at large and moves toward creating change in environments that can then better help people who are at risk.”
OMG, that’s a brilliant term for that, why have I never heard it before?!