Lgbt People

"How many more will have to die for this war against the poor to be over?"

"The roses of resistance bloom from asphalt. We receive roses, but we will be with a clenched fist talking about our place of existence against the commands and abuses that affect our lives."

"It is not by chance that when arriving in the favelas … the police quickly hoist a [Brazilian] flag as a signal of territorial control. That is because these territories are seen … as the enemy’s territory."

"I will not be interrupted. I will not put up with interruption from a citizen who comes here and does not know how to listen to the position of an elected woman!"

"I didn't want her to be a flag, a slogan. She is missed and we really miss Mari's joy, strength, bravery, brilliance."

"From a young age, Marielle stood out from the crowd. She was a natural leader at school, at the church and in the projects she took part in. She was involved in community vegetable gardens, college preparatory courses for the underprivileged and movements against violence, always with the aim of helping others. She believed that collective organization based on solidarity could change the world. Doing things for others made her feel good."

"They took Marielle from us, but they couldn't take away what Marielle means."

"Before Marielle was killed, not a lot of people knew of her. But now the whole world knows about her, and the truth is that, in death, Marielle was able to touch so many more people than she was when she was alive."

"Today's mic-hogging, fast-talking, contentious young (and old) lefties continue to hawk little books and pamphlets on revolution, always with choice words or documents from Marx, Mao, even Malcolm. But I've never seen a broadside with "A Black Feminist Statement or even the writings of Angela Davis or June Jordan or Barbara Omolade or Flo Kennedy or Audre Lorde or bell hooks or Michelle Wallace, at least not from the groups who call themselves leftist. These women's collective wisdom has provided the richest insights into American radicalism's most fundamental questions: How can we build a multiracial movement? Who are the working class and what do they desire? How do we resolve the Negro Question and the Woman Question? What is freedom? Barbara Smith, one of the founding members of the Combahee River Collective, is among the radical voices that have addressed these questions. Since the heyday of the civil rights movement, she has been telling white people that fighting racism is necessary for their own survival and liberation, not some act of philanthropy to help the downtrodden Negroes of the ghetto. She has been telling black activists that fighting homophobia is their issue because the policing of sexuality, no matter to whom it is directed, affects everyone. And she has been sharply critical of lesbian and movements for the narrowness of their political agendas. She knows what it will take to win freedom. "As a socialist and an alert Black woman, it is clear to me that it is not possible to achieve justice, especially economic justice, and equality under capitalism because capitalism was never designed for that to be the case. The assaults from the present system necessitate that most activists work for reforms, but those of us who are radicals understand that it is possible to do so at the very same time that we work for fundamental change-a revolution.""

"Black women writers have been around a long time, and they have suffered consistent inattention. Despite this reality, you hear from various sources that black women really have "it." We're getting jobs; we're getting this and that, supposedly. Yet we still constitute the lowest economic group in America. Meanwhile those of us who do not fit into the "establishment" have not been allowed a voice, and it was only with the advent of the women's movement-even though black women are in disagreement with many aspects of the women's movement-that black women began to demand a voice, as women and as blacks. I think any of us who are honest have to say this. As Barbara Smith says, "All the women were white and all the blacks were men, but some of us are still brave." Her book on black women's studies [Some of Us Are Brave], which she edited along with Gloria Hull and Patricia Bell Scott, is the first one on the subject."

"It will be six years next month since the vision of KTP (Kitchen Table Press) became a reality through the hard work of Barbara Smith and Cherrie Moraga and Myrna and the others."

"I became more firmly committed to feminism when I met Barbara Smith in 1975 at the Socialist Feminist Conference at Antioch College. We ran into each other as we were both leaving a session where some Marxist women were making quite homophobic statements about lesbians. I asked her, “Are you gay?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “So am I. This conference is sickening.” Anyway, I learned a great deal from Barbara in terms of her outspokenness and her courage to say, “I have such a deep commitment to feminism.” And as I began to meet other black feminists through Smith, my commitment became deeper as well."

"the legendary African-American feminist scholar Barbara Smith, founder of the Combahee River Collective and of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press."

"My association with Aunt Lute Books began with Borderlands. I was in Minnesota for the Great Midwestern Book Show, on a panel with several writers discussing whether the writer should be an engaged writer. A couple of black male writers on the panel attacked Alice Walker and other black women writers, accusing them of emasculating black men in their writings. Then they turned on me, and the facilitator, who was inexperienced, didn't intervene. From the audience, Barbara Smith, writer and cofounder of Kitchen Table Press, spoke up on behalf of Alice Walker and all the other people. She was great."

"Insisting upon an integrated analysis and politics that recognizes that the major systems of oppression are interlocking, Barbara Smith observed that "the concept of simultaneity of oppression is... the crux of a Black feminist understanding of political reality and, I believe, one of the most significant ideological contributions of Black feminist thought.""

"I learned a lot from the black arts movement. I loved reading black feminist thinkers on my own (outside of academia)—Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, June Jordan, bell hooks, etc."

"When contemporary feminist movement first began, feminist writings and scholarship by black women was groundbreaking. The writings of black women like Cellestine Ware, Toni Cade Bambara, Michele Wallace, Barbara Smith, and Angela Davis, to name a few, were all works that sought to articulate, define, speak to and against the glaring omissions in feminist work, the erasure of black female presence."

"We have to look at our international situation. We have to look at our relationship to the rest of the world. We export white supremacy. Your previous guest was talking about the incredible repercussions of the United States’ ongoing so-called foreign policy, which is really war policy, and that, I think he said, there were only 11 years in the entire history of the country when we weren’t involved in warfare. What does that say about what kind of nation we are? And so much of that has been racialized. And particularly, you know, I would say, since World War II, the skirmishes, and not — I mean, they’re bigger than skirmishes — the military adventures that this nation engages in just always seems to be against populations of people of color."

"it’s important for people to know that I was born under Jim Crow. I was born in 1946, so Jim Crow was the law of the land during that time, during my growing-up years. And the reason it’s important, I think, is because it shaped very much who I was and my perspective on this project of U.S. democracy, that we’re still trying to improve."

"what The Combahee River Collective is most known for is that we wrote a statement, the Combahee River Collective Statement, in 1977. It was actually for a book that was edited by the wonderful antiracist and feminist scholar Zillah Eisenstein. And the book was titled Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. So, we wrote something for the book, that she asked us to do, and the something turned out to be the Combahee River Collective Statement, which, seemingly, has stood the test of time. And many people still read it, refer to it. And, in fact, the Black Lives Matter and Movement for Black Lives, those movements actually say that they have relied upon the kinds of ideas of black women’s liberation that were in that statement."

"when you think about the issues of — the issue of white supremacy, it’s absolutely entwined — again, much like racial capitalism — it’s entwined with patriarchy and with homophobia and transphobia. So, you can’t really address one without the other."

"And that’s where we are now. Do we have the political will to actually eradicate white supremacy, or do we just want to kind of nip around the edges of it and do cosmetic things? You know? Taking down the Confederate statues, very, very important, very glad that’s happening, but it doesn’t necessarily get to the material conditions of people who live under this system, nor does it address the incredible violent racism that results in people like a Jacob Blake being shot seven times in front of his tiny children at point-blank range."

"("Could you speak to young activists who work around issues of identity politics, and what advice would you give them?") Well, the first thing I would say is, you’ve got to work in coalition. You cannot be so — what’s the word? — so immersed in your own particular experiences, your wonderful, multilayered, complex experiences of your identity. You can’t be so immersed in that, that you cannot look out at that person across the room, across the street, in another neighborhood, in another nation, around the globe. You cannot be so immersed in what you are experiencing that you cannot see that wider arc of a need to work for justice and do it in coalition and in solidarity with others. And I think that’s what has been lost. I think that because identity politics and black feminism and some of the things that I have actually helped to establish in academic context, I think that sometimes when they’re talked about in academic context, people don’t understand that, no, what we’re really talking about is positioning ourselves so that we can build a mass movement for positive political change and for justice. So, when people think that the only people we’re talking to are people who have the exact same list of identities that they have, I always say, “Why would I want to work with people who are just like me? That would be boring.” So, that would be my major advice, is take that risk. Take that risk of joining in coalitions, doing work on the ground where you live. Like, if you live in a city, there’s probably — there are a lot of issues, but one of the issues might likely be gun violence. Another one might be poverty or poor housing. Another one might be schools that are not of sufficient quality so that everybody has great opportunities as they grow up and become adults and get into life. See what it would be like to walk into a school board meeting. Do you see what I’m saying? Maybe you do. I bet you do, Amy. But it’s just really so important that we stretch and that we work for justice across the board. And that doesn’t mean that we can’t be in our own — you know, our own safe spaces, in our own kind of home kind of environments. We can do both."

"Smith's chapter in Yours in Struggle, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Relationships between Black and Jewish Women," acknowledged that addressing anti-Semitism set her up to look like a "woman of color overly concerned about 'white' issues." She confessed that her experiences with Jewish women had been "terrorizing" and admitted that she was anti-Semitic, largely because she had been brought up to be suspicious of whites. But Smith charged that in Jewish women's efforts to combat anti-Semitism, they had exercised racism toward black women. She urged black women to understand that they shared commonalities with Jewish women, included being oppressed by the white majority."

"For those of you who are tired of hearing about racism, imagine how much more tired we are of experiencing it. ... The degree to which it is hard or uncomfortable for you to have the issue raised is the degree to which you know inside of yourself that you aren't dealing with the issue. ... I want to say right here that this is not a "guilt trip." It's a fact trip."

"I started writing about white supremacy earlier this summer, after George Floyd was lynched. I was so full of rage and pain, because I’ve been dealing with this ever since Emmett Till was lynched in 1955. I was 8 years old when that happened, so, of course, I could not fully understand what had actually transpired. I just knew that the people in my family, who were all from the Deep South — I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, because they were part of the Great Migration — I just knew they were very, very upset about someone named Emmett Till, and that this person was also a child, like my twin sister Beverly and me. So, as I said, I’ve been dealing with this for quite a long time, 1955 until the spring of 2020 and beyond. So, I just thought, “I’ve got to write.” I’m a writer. I just thought, “I’ve got to write about this.” What motivated me was the fact that when people were talking about these issues, either in print or in media, visual media, etc., that they never really talked about white supremacy. They would talk about race relations. They would talk about implicit bias. They would talk about needing to reform and change the culture of policing. All well and good, but they never talked about where all this mess comes from. And that’s what I wanted to write about."

"you can’t talk about race in the United States without talking about class, and you can’t talk about class without talking about race. Racism, white supremacy, capitalism are absolutely intertwined. You know, it’s like a vine that has wrapped itself around a tree or another plant."

"this country functions with white supremacy as its engine, an engine that runs so many aspects — banking, healthcare, education. All these disparities that we see, it would take quite a bit to say, “I think, you know, we need to get rid of that.”"

"One new phenomenon that developed over the weeks of rioting was antifa activists masquerading as press in order to avoid being arrested by police or to get closer to them to throw projectiles. They simply printed out homemade media badges and wrote ‘press’ on their clothing. On multiple occasions, they were seen participating in violence themselves, such as throwing rocks and fireworks at officers or blinding them with flashlights. Sometimes they actively provoked the police into arresting them so their comrades could record video and send out tweets about police ‘targeting’ media. This was effective, and the ACLU of Oregon sued Portland police and federal agents on behalf of left-wing legal observers and journalists in July. A federal judge granted an emergency injunction exempting anyone who identified as a journalist from dispersal orders."

"In mid-July, the federal government put up a strong reinforced barrier around the courthouse. Other barriers previously put up were quickly torn apart. This one was made of thick steel, and it was reinforced by concrete blocks on the other side. The fence withstood for many days, but on the fifty-ninth night of rioting, hundreds gathered with tools and equipment to bring down the barrier. They used electric saws to cut into the fence, but the holes they made were too small for people to fit through. Next, they tied rope around strategic points of the fence, and hundreds of rioters participated in pulling it down."

"Responding police cruisers had their tires slashed by rioters who dumped nail-filled pool noodles on the street… the night before, rioters tried to break into the Portland Police East Precinct. Two elderly women who lived nearby tried to stop the mob from setting fire to the building. As one of them used an extinguisher to put out a fire, she was screamed at and harassed. The mob then hurled paint at them. One woman had it thrown in her face and eyes."

"From May through August 2020, hundreds had been taken into custody by law enforcement. But the result was the same for almost everyone: the Multnomah County district attorney dropped the charges, even the serious felonies. Assarrah Butler, the accused riot supplier who, in June, sped off in her car, hitting other vehicles, was originally charged with felony riot, felony failure to perform duties of driver to injured person, felony criminal mischief, felony fleeing, reckless driving, and reckless endangering. Every single charge was dropped. Likewise, an accused arsonist who allegedly admitted to roommates she was part of antifa, had all her charges dismissed. The dropping and dismissal of their felony charges were the norm, not the exception."

"Then in July, the mob’s attention fully switched to the federal courthouse with an intensity not previously seen… Several in the mob openly carried rifles and handguns. One of the men arrested at the riot was antifa shooter Michael Reinoehl. He was carrying an illegal firearm and resisted arrest, requiring three Portland Police officers to be subdued. However, he was only cited and released because he claimed to be injured. His criminal charges were later dropped by the Multnomah County District Attorney. Reinoehl went on to kill a Trump supporter the following month in downtown Portland."

"Within less than two weeks, there were nearly a hundred arson fires in and around downtown Portland. Despite the violence and vandalism, a federal judge temporarily banned the [Portland Police Bureau] PPB from using tear gas. The response from elected city officials was to deny the violence and praise the protests. After the first night of mass looting, arson, and violence, Mayor Wheeler tweeted: ‘We talked about agitation—yes even violent agitation and how it has historically occurred with purpose and resulted in change that has moved this country forward.’"

"On September 5, rioters marched to attack the East Precinct, as they had done many times before. But that night, they hurled lit firebombs for the first time. Over the previous months, Portland Police had confiscated unused Molotov cocktails, but none had actually been used at the riots. However, that night, a masked rioter hurled a firebomb in the direction of a line of police. It fell short of its target and instead landed at the feet of a group of protesters. Two people were set on fire,…"

"Though nearly 280 people were arrested throughout May and June, almost all of them were quickly released without bail or conditions, even when they violently resisted arrest and were found to be carrying weapons… Rioters would simply return to the riot again, sometimes within the same day, and face no consequences for subsequent arrests."

"One of the most effective ways we’ve seen law enforcement agencies brought to their knees is through frivolous lawsuits bankrolled by endless donors. ‘Lawfare’ refers to the act of abusing the legal system to achieve goals."

"There exist large networks of far-left attorneys and legal groups who bring endless lawsuits in an attempt to defund, cripple, and embarrass police. In early June 2020, far-left BLM-style group Don’t Shoot Portland filed a class action lawsuit against the city to stop the use of tear gas."

"For the next four hours, rioters continued to light fires on the street and hurled more mortar fireworks at officers. One sergeant was directly hit by an explosive, which burned through his glove, injuring his hand… Over fifty people were arrested that night, including Kristina Narayan, the legislative director for Tina Kotek, the Democratic Speaker of the Oregon House. Joseph Robert Sipe, 23, was arrested and charged with first-degree attempted murder, first-degree attempted assault, first-degree arson, and possession of a destructive device. Court documents say he admitted to lighting the wick of a Molotov cocktail and then launching it toward the police officers. The district attorney later dropped three of the four most serious charges. The following week. Mayor Wheeler announced a total ban on the use of tear gas for crowd control."

"PDX Community Jail Support aided arrested rioters immediately after their release from jail. They set up a camp outside the central police precinct and offered arrestees food, phone access, legal support, and rides home. In short, they streamlined the riot catch-and-release process."

"Thousands around the United States support antifa and the far left. They are willing to donate to their fundraisers. Politicians and celebrities promote their causes, and local media provide favorable coverage. Riot Ribs was one of the most successful Portland antifa mutual aid groups during the summer. It raised more than $330,000 but suddenly dissolved overnight in July 2020 and disappeared, along with the money."

"Politicians in the city are terrified of political and media backlash for holding antifa and far-left protesters accountable. The local and national media are staunchly on the side of antifa, regardless of their violence against police and property."

"The Portland General Defense Committee publishes a financial accountability page on its website… Bail bonds ranging from several hundred dollars up to $50,000 were paid for more than a hundred people. In effect, the group is using a GoFundMe campaign to channel money to causes that are otherwise not allowed on the platform."

"All that occurred on just the first night of rioting in Portland. It continued the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. For weeks, rioters descended on the Justice Center every night as if it were a ritual. They’d surround the building, confront the police standing guard, and attack them with projectiles and mortar explosives. Many of them used powerful lasers against the police that could burn eyes and cause permanent damage to vision. By the middle of the summer, these lasers became so numerous that the rioters who carried them organized into their own ‘unit, and the protests began to look like laser shows."

"At every step of the way, the Portland City Council demonized its police force, accusing them of racism and brutality… They pushed for the Portland Police’s Gun Violence Reduction Team to be dissolved after Floyd’s death, claiming it targeted blacks. The mayor gave his support, and the unit was dismantled. In the following months, shootings and homicides in Portland spiked to the highest level in decades. Compared to the year prior, shootings in July and August 2020 in Portland increased by almost 200 percent."

"Meanwhile, the daily violent antifa protests were becoming more organized and sophisticated. Media pundits inaccurately described what was happening as spontaneous and organic, but what I saw on antifa social media accounts was a deliberate, strategic, and organized plan to grow and entrench the riots. Through advertising on Reddit, Instagram, Snapshot, and Twitter, they were widely successful in getting support not just from antifa fans but also from the wider left."

"As I left Seattle, I mourned for the law-abiding people who had been terrorized into silence. They were completely failed by their elected leaders. And despite the organized violence playing out in the open, the media headlines still denied the existence of antifa. ‘How much more violence and chaos by antifa are politicians willing to accept?’ I asked myself while on the train out of the city. Unfortunately, a whole lot more."

"As much as CHAZ was an experiment in anarchy and chaos, it was also a successful experiment in propaganda making. What journalists were allowed to record was heavily controlled by the residents there. For example, in one instance a black man carried an American flag through the zone. He was immediately accosted the followed by a large mob, including masked black bloc antifa, who shouted racist invectives at him. ‘Race traitor! Race traitor’ one man yelled repeatedly on a bullhorn. ‘ Fox News will use this,’ another person yelled after rioters tried to steal his flag. This became a relatively common refrain in CHAZ anytime fights broke out. CHAZ supporters were not interested in reality. They wanted the media to broadcast to the world a fabricated utopia."

"Faizel Khan, the owner of Café Argento, told the New York Times: ‘They barricaded us all in here.’ He didn’t dare speak out to media until weeks after CHAZ’s demise. ‘[T]hey were sitting in lawn chairs with guns.’ His testimony to the paper comports with what I witnessed myself. Though there thousands in CHAZ during the day, actual business was incredibly slow. Customer traffic was severely impacted from the street blockades. People could only travel in and out by foot."

"One glaring blind spot in the mainstream media coverage of CHAZ was how the space gave platform to violent extremist ideologies. Reports about CHAZ’s political agenda focused shallowly on ‘racial justice’ and ‘defunding the police’ rather than its explicit calls to kill cops and overthrow the government. Hundreds of graffiti messages and images lined the zone showing dead pigs wearing police hats."