21st Century African American Women

"I think part of what we have to talk about is the fact that one of the main tricks, I think, of white supremacy is that it invisiblizes both kind of structures of violence and tries to focus mostly on individual forms of violence, right? So that when we see a situation where, for the most part, the people who are doing these mass killings are mostly young white men, the story gets told that that is a form of violence that’s kind of an acceptable, normal form of violence. When people of color and others commit forms of violence, we are told and taught to see that as somehow outside of the norm of general kinds of violence, and we tend to catastrophize that. And then that also leads to certain kinds of policy responses that are intended to actually continue to oppress the groups that are very much already targeted and oppressed. So, I think that that is a big aspect of this that we have to look at, that you can’t look at these mass shootings without understanding also the ways in which violence is the glue that holds forms of oppression in place. And one of those forms of oppression is white supremacist kinds of forms of violence and oppression."

"Often, the home is a practice ground often for the violence that then becomes public violence. We really do take—you know, tend to minimize private violence and focus on the spectacular examples of public violence. But if we don’t address that private violence, then we are going to continue to see public violence in the ways that we have."

"We have animation studios in Africa, but I am yet to see anybody that can say I am an independent animation studio owner. We are trying to see that animations are well generated in Africa. We want a platform where young people can dialogue and be part of the game."

"Animation can be used to tell stories. My film, The Legacy of Rubies, which won Best Animation at AMAA, tells a story and to make these young ones know that they can do it too. All we need is the capacities to be established."

"I already knew what I wanted to be at the age of seven, but there was no capacity for it here. But I was able to achieve my dream"

"I want to do documentaries that change the way people view Africa"

"When working I say to myself, ‘I am a product. It’s not about you. It’s about the vision these people have for their product and you just either happen to fit or not into their idea"

"When I got my hair dreadlocked ahead of New York fashion week, I had some pushback from people in the industry worried that I wouldn’t get jobs – the suggestion was that I might look “too black”. But I enjoy being different and standing out – so I decided to keep them and take my chances."

"It is a very difficult thing to take up modelling as a profession in Nigeria because of the influence of our parents. You won’t get your parents support especially when they want you to be something else like being a lawyer or doctor."

"I wanted to do a project that was digestible for everyone. The idea was to do a video that showed beauty in Muslim women. Just because you’re wearing a hijab doesn’t mean you’re scary. It is not about race. It’s not about religion. It’s not about clothes. It’s about beauty."

"A lot of images I’ve seen of women in hijabs are negative. I want to show the world that Islam isn’t a scary thing. I want everyone to see what I see."

"My ultimate end game and destination is far from the runways of New York. I want to continue my work in cinema and the arts. Nigeria is so nostalgic for me because it is the only place I have ever felt at home. When I get back to Nigeria to see dilapidated building, poor infrastructures and bad road network I begin to think that we need to do more to fix things beyond waiting for government. It is time to make things work for our race and country. Nobody will do this for the black race"

"I am on a mission to destigmatize America’s interpretation and views toward Islam. For the record, I am a Buddhist. The objective is to promote unity."

"I believe that poverty is the root cause of crime. So, if you want better health outcomes or better outcomes in general from some of the things that all cities deal with—like increased crime and increased poverty—you must provide opportunities for people to have money and to live their best lives"

"I see my job as mayor to find ways to expand options for people to exercise their right to vote within state law"

"I will not stay silent when I spot racism," Jones, 49, said during her speech, delivered at the city's Omega Center. "I will not stay silent when I spot homophobia or transphobia. I will not stay silent when I spot xenophobia. I will not stay silent when I spot religious intolerance. I will not stay silent when I spot any injustice.""

"Judge Chutkan can handle this quite quickly if she wants to and I think she probably will. She was a very efficient judge. She will give each side 10 days to brief it, have a hearing and decide it. She knows whatever she decides is not going to stay with her."

"Defendant’s four-year service as commander in chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens."

"Whatever immunities a sitting President may enjoy, the United States has only one Chief Executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass."

"To compare the actions of people around the country protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights, to a violent mob seeking to overthrow the lawfully elected government is a false equivalency and downplays the very real danger that the crowd on January 6 posed to our democracy."

"The country is watching to see what the consequences are for something that has not ever happened in the history of this country before"

"There have to be consequences for participating in an attempted violent overthrow of the government beyond sitting at home"

"A judge’s rulings should never be affected by political ideology or motivation. I can state unreservedly that should I be confirmed, my rulings will be based on text and precedent, and my decisions will be made solely on the application of the law to the facts"

"Unenviable position of inheriting many lawsuits from the previous administrations, and in many cases is required to defend the city, not to mention her fiduciary duty to the taxpayers as well"

"Equitable development must be driven by the community, not by politics"

"We have always wanted community input. We have to meet people where they are and we want them to tell us how their government can work for them not the other way around"

"When I talk about addressing the root causes of crime, I am talking about supporting families and communities that have suffered disinvestment for decades under the failed status quo"

"For any Black woman who is considering running for office, I would first say to her that you are complete. You don’t need any additional education or degrees"

"The first interactions I had with the ideas of abolition work were around the system of slavery. [For people living during that time,] it felt impossible that that system could end and there could be some other way of functioning that didn't rely on Black people being enslaved. And I think we're in a similar moment now. It's impossible to imagine what our societies would do, what cultures would do, what communities would do if we didn't have prisons."

"This pandemic has unveiled for a lot of us just how small our reliable communities are, and how much we need to deepen those relationships so that they can hold change and conflict and differences."

"I don't think that we're quite at the place where we can do a prescriptive framework. I think we're so early in the experiment of this phase of abolition. That said, I point in the book to resources that I think are able to do a lot more of that. Fumbling Towards Repair by Shira Hassan and Mariame Kaba is an incredible resource. It's a workbook that basically supports people who want to go through a transformative justice process. And Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha [and Ejeris Dixon] put out a book called Beyond Survival that really is like a grand gathering of transformative justice stories, case studies, lessons from people. Patrisse Cullors is releasing An Abolitionist Handbook this year, which which has this 12-step program of what it looks like to actually take abolition on as a practice."

"What I'm making a case for is that disposability is a concept that might be the most villainous for our species: to think that there's some way we can get rid of people who commit harm, and that will remove the harmful behavior and the harmful belief systems from our communities. And when it doesn’t—it hasn’t—at a certain point we have to ask ourselves, what are we doing? And what are some alternative ways we could be spending that time to help us actually stop harm from happening, deepen our relationship with each other and grow movements that can hold difference, that can hold conflict, that can recover from misunderstanding, that can fundamentally make a case that abolition is really possible?"

"White supremacy has a certain view of who the villain is. Patriarchy has a certain view of who the villain is. Capitalism has a certain view of who the villain is. Ableism has a certain view of who the villain is. And throughout history, we have notoriously been wrong about who the villain actually is, or what concepts are actually villainous concepts to our species."

"How do we ensure that the survivors' needs are actually getting met? What would actually create the boundaries and the spaciousness that we're trying to give to survivors for their healing, while also helping the person who has created this offense to break the cycle of harm within them? And some of what seems to help is to have a sense that all of us get harmed, and all of us commit harms."

"I'm thinking about abolition all the time, trying to understand how we bring it to pass: How do we defund policing? How do we defund the prison system? How do we actually break those patterns in ourselves in order to break them in the larger world? So a lot of it for me is connected to that."

"how do we start to retune our attention towards things that are solution-oriented, things that help us build? And this is a hard time for that. We've been immersed in a culture of destruction for such a long time."

"I think we're in this really important, beautiful phase where we're learning so much can happen even at a distance. But it's a double-edged sword because so much of what is happening is happening on platforms that were not necessarily designed for us to use them to foment change and to bring down systems of harm. They were designed to serve capitalism, which means they want as many clicks and likes and as much engagement as possible. And what gets a lot of engagement is drama."

"Life moves towards life, you know. That’s the trick."

"You are a personal front line. What’s happening in your life and in the relationships you have with your family and how you treat people when you’re upset with them — I always ask people that, when I talk about transformative justice: Are you punishing anyone right now? And could that punishment be shifted into a boundary or a request? Is there a courageous conversation that needs to be had? How do you personally begin to practice whatever’s in alignment with your largest vision? Abolition is something we practice every day in our lives. Liberation, emergent strategy, all of these are things to practice every day. And I guess maybe to bring it back to the first question of spiritual practice — to me, that’s the ultimate spiritual practice, as well. It’s not about the bombastic meditation retreat. It’s about, can you sit every day? Can you bring mindfulness into every activity?"

"Octavia Butler said that “[t]here’s nothing new / under the sun, / but there are new suns.” We are in a time of new suns. We’re in a time of new suns. We have no idea what we could be, but everything that we have been is falling apart. So it’s time to change. And we can be mindful about that. That’s exciting."

"We’re losing leaders left and right, because people are making mistakes and now there’s no room for making mistakes."

"Can we be honest — at least honest that there’s not love in the way we’re doing it now? Because I think that was also what was hurting my heart, was people being like, Yeah, we just have to love each other — and then we’re doing the most awful, awful dismissals and disposals of each other."

"We can begin to see there are no isolated patterns. The universe has some favorites, and they repeat and they repeat, at every scale."

"Everything dies, but that’s kind of good. It makes for a very rich world. All the richness, all that fecundity, all that beautiful miracle of life, it happens because we live in cycles, not perpetuity."

"Organizing is a way of saying, We are going to put our hands directly on the future. But it’s also time-traveling backwards. So much of organizing is looking back at, what did our ancestors try? What did they learn? What were they up to?"

"In that process, I started the work of emergent strategy, started to listen to what is up with the natural world — what can it teach us about how to be humans and how to be humans in a better relationship with each other? And what I realized is it is the work of radical imagination to do so, but also that we’re living inside of imaginations that other people told us were true and told us were like, this is how the world is. And I always uplift my friend Terry Marshall. He was the first person to say this to me, that we’re in an imagination battle, which just blew my mind. And I think about it often — that we live in this abundant world, and we’ve been told it’s scarce. And then we’re given all these stories of scarcity. So, so much of the work, for me, of radical imagination is like, what does it look like to imagine beyond the constructs? What does it look like to imagine a future where we all get to be there, not causing harm to each other, and experiencing abundance?"

"I want my lineage to be a lineage of someone who fought hard for human existence on this planet. My despair and grief and fear and anger informed that, and they're powerful parts of that fight, just as much as my love."

"I know that I'm not grieving because death is unnatural, I'm grieving because love has overfilled my banks, and I can no longer just pour it into this other person. When I'm angry, it's because I love something, and I want to defend it. When I am feeling fearful is because I love something."

"The stories I think we need to tell are ones of what it is like to be in a relationship with the Earth. What is it like to live on an abundant Earth? What are communities that are thriving by being in relationship to the Earth? What does enough feel like?"

"Imagination is a muscle that, for many of us, will atrophy if we don't use it, especially under the pressure of constant fear. Fear and imagination often can't be in the same room. So, one of the things I think to strengthen that muscle is, first of all, reading. Reading visionary fiction, reading visionary texts. I often recommend Octavia Butler to people because it's reading things that are hard. Walidah Imarisha always says, "It's realistic and hard, but it's hopeful that change is possible." How do we be with what is and keep our eyes up?"