Political Activists

"I had really nobody in my family whom I could talk about these things with. This passion for making a difference, the passion for helping young people find out who they are, gain strength in their own identity, those were things I was struggling with as well. I realized very young that if I don’t do it myself, nobody can really do it for me. I think young people need to be helped toward that realization."

"My brother is authentic. He really believes in what he is trying to do. So there’s no hidden agenda. In that sense, he really is an open book. And I think that authenticity, that passion, and the image and the drive—it resonates with people."

"I manage that because Barack Obama’s in his present situation as the president of the United States is a very new thing, and it’s also something very temporary. I’ve been around for a lot longer, so I’ve already defined myself long before he became the president of the United States so in my own right I have my own identity. So in that sense I am able to, well, actually I’m learning, and I keep having to adjust to being Barack Obama’s sister, who is the president of the United States. But being me as Auma Obama, that is not an issue. It’s trying to accommodate the “new” – this new role that I’m received in, the attention I get, this visibility I get. In terms of my identity I think I’m pretty secure, as best one can be."

"I don’t get tired of being called Barack Obama’s sister because I am. I get tired of being called Barack Obama’s “half-sister” because I’m not. In our culture he’s just my brother, I’m his sister, so being called Barack Obama’s sister, I have no problem with that at all. I guess it becomes an issue when people see me as an extension of him and focus on that. So I guess this sense of “we’re inviting Barack Obama’s sister”, “we’re speaking to Barack Obama’s sister” to get closer to Barack Obama and find out more about him. To an extent it is justified, but that’s not all that I’m about, so I’m very conscious of that, and I’m conscious of making people aware of that and trying to make that clear that is part of the conversation."

"If I’m teaching young people to use their voices and be active in making their lives a success."

"You can’t do this or that because you’re a girl. Or, You have to do this because you’re a girl. I asked Why? I’m a human being first."

"Germans always like to think that they have a very liberal attitude towards Africans. But when you scratch the surface you can see that they they still carry around the prejudices of their childhood. In German fairy tales black people always appear as the bogey man. You don't forget things like that so easily."

"Poverty is no excuse. Development aid has to be linked to economic development,"

"I felt a kinship with him automatically. I was very nervous and worried about not connecting immediately and then having to be in his home—because I was going to be staying with him. But when I met him it was so easy. We just started talking as though we’d known each other always, and that was actually something really special."

""For me I wanted to use my music to have a positive change into the society, and positive change is not only spiritual change. Positive change for me has been a peace activist, an environmental activist, women empowerment and girl empowerment"."

"Africa has challenges because of its diversity, and that could also be its strength."

"You are limitless, you are in control of so many things, they are superficial. You are an entertainer, the minute you are off that stage don't expect, do not carry that euphoria to the rest of your life"

"...to understand that Africa has resources. Its greatest resource is in its people. How you see us as solving the problem together with you, and positioning yourselves to be facilitators of this process, rather than fixing us, might be one way that we could begin to solve these problems."

"A lot of what we do is affected by our cultural way of doing things. If we engage with African people, they would be able to help us think about their culture and how it affects farming."

"A peace process is not about the mathematics of numbers and percentages in relation to who is in majority or minority. It is about plurality, diversity, participation and ownership of all affected by the conflict and who live in the context hence nothing less than full participation and ownership."

"“Feast with your enemies. So I do my best to prepare and offer food to those with whom I find myself in disagreement.""

"I dedicate myself and the right livelihood award owner to the service of peace in a practical way to consolidate the work already undertaken and to give a new energy and focus in developing peace system by harnessing the body of knowledge through establishing a University for peace in Wajir Kenya."

"I was very young, just 20, in 1964. A lot of people were speaking on top of the car, [including] Mario Savio and Art Goldberg, who later became an attorney. They were almost all men, and I thought I might have something to say and that a woman ought to get up there and say something. Later on, the other person who spoke on top of the car was Jackie Goldberg, who is wonderful and later became one of the most important state legislators. Later, when we were surrounded by the police and it looked like they were going to break us up, a woman lawyer spoke on the top of the car. I didn’t have any feminist consciousness, it was just a feeling. I had a great time speaking on top of the car. The crowd was marvelous, it was at night, the lights of the cameras were blinding me, so I couldn’t see, but I could hear them and feel them. I quoted Frederick Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” The crowd roared back."

"Mr. Asaf Ali wrote to Pandit Shyamji in September, 1909: “I am staying with some Muslim friends who do not like me to associate with nationalists; and, to save many unpleasant consequences, I do not want to irritate them unnecessarily.” Thus the Muslim antagonism to the Freedom Movement of India dates back to its beginning itself. (151ff)"

"(What are your thoughts on American Jewish engagement in politics now?) BA: We are a very small minority in the population. We have had over decades of very significant influence and [engagement] in progressive politics. A very disproportionate number of white students that went south are Jewish. Michael Schwerner [a Congress of Racial Equality social worker], and Andrew Goodman [a civil rights activist killed by the Ku Klux Klan] were Jewish, from New York. That was not unusual. [These numbers] are very disproportionate in relation to our numbers in the population. The Reform Rabbis that I have encountered were very much involved in the Civil Rights Movement. There is this historic connection between black and Jewish activists in the 30s and 40s. What I see happening today, [Jews] are still very progressive on domestic issues. [Jews] still generally vote Democratic. [There was an] overwhelming vote for Obama and for Hillary from the Jews. Some of the students that come to me who are pro-Palestine – I say… don’t demonize Israelis and don’t demonize the Jewish people."

"I think many girls and women experience this split of appearing totally together and on top of things but are internally a total mess. I’m an incest survivor, I’m dealing with sexual harassment, I have huge issues with low self-esteem, worthlessness, [and] suicidal tendencies."

"(What do you wish you could tell yourself at the time? Girls your age now?) BA: I wish that I could have taken a class like what I teach. I wish feminist studies and women’s studies classes were offered [when I was in college]. [At my age,] You knew how you felt but you didn’t know what to do about it. I knew I was a lesbian [but] I didn’t have the language for it. There were lesbians in the Communist party, [but] the party was very homophobic. Some of [the lesbians] were living together openly but never talking about it. It was don’t ask, don’t tell."

"History does not repeat itself, but our reading of history shapes our perception of the world and our vision of how to change it. With the collective rendering of woman's legacy still to come, we will reckon a course that transforms our reading of the human experience and allows us to navigate through hitherto unknown waters. (p 151)"

"I find myself again cut off, babbling "buts." I find myself then, also, drawn to Catharine MacKinnon's eloquent "discourses on life and law," in which she argues that viewing gender as a matter of sameness and difference covers up the reality of gender as a system of power, hierarchy, and privilege, of imposed inequality. The point is that more than one thing is true for us at the same time. A masculinist process, however, at least as it has been institutionalized in Western society, accentuates the combative, the oppositional, the either/or dichotomies, the "right" and the "wrong." What I have been about throughout this book is showing that the dailiness of women's lives structures a different way of knowing and a different way of thinking. The process that comes from this way of knowing has to be at the center of a women's politics, and it has to be at the center of a women's scholarship. This is why I have been drawn to the poetry and to the stories: because they are layered, because more than one truth is represented, because there is ambiguity and paradox. When we work together in coalitions, or on the job, or in academic settings, or in the community, we have to allow for this ambiguity and paradox, respect each other, our cultures, our integrity, our dignity. As we have pressured against racial and sex discrimination, institutional doors have been opened, however tenuously and with whatever reluctance. Some of us have been allowed in, but nothing about the values of those institutions or their rules of success has changed, whether they be academic, corporate, ecclesiastic, political, medical, or juridical. The point is to change the values and the rules and to change the process by which they are established and enforced. The point is to integrate ideas about love and healing, about balance and connection, about beauty and growing, into our everyday ways of being. We have to believe in the value of our own experiences and in the value of our ways of knowing, our ways of doing things. We have to wrap ourselves in these ways of knowing, to enact daily ceremonies of life. (p 253-4)"

"One particularly poignant aspect of the debate within the American CP's National Committee was that it pitted Bettina Aptheker, who denounced the invasion, against her own father, Herbert Aptheker. Bettina was one of the liveliest of the young people who rose to prominence in the Party in the 1960s, and also one of the warmest human beings I've ever met. She adored her father, so it could not have been easy for her to oppose him that day."

"The desert is a metaphor. For how long women have endured. Like creosote. Waiting for the rains. We are the rains. (p 254)"

"It was my experience in the Angela Davis trial that propelled me into a study of Afro-American women's history and, ultimately, into women's studies."

"women did not have such exciting lives in the Sixties. A man had a much more dramatic life. I think about the literary scene in the Sixties when I was writing, also, in Berkeley. You'd go to a party, and what I'd love about the party is that the poets would get up and read, would entertain one another with poetry-but it was always the guys that would get up and read, and the girls were always in the back listening to the poems. And so to write about that time, even during the times of the demonstrations, the men had all the exciting jobs. Even Bettina Aptheker complains about having to run the mimeograph machine. And then also, men had a more dangerous life, too, because they had the draft. They were always susceptible to having to go to Vietnam. So there's that dramatic story that they had that the women did not have."

"The formation of a lesbian (and gay) identity, divested of Freudian origin, is in process. (p 119)"

"We have to stop thinking in oppositional categories. We have to stop thinking that one line is "correct" and that others must be "won over" to it, while those who disagree are "defeated." (p 252)"

"Part of our leadership is understanding that you can’t change what other people think of you, but you can change how you react to their thinking and how you respond to it."

"No matter what your otherness is, it is not an impediment, it is not a detraction, it is a source of power."

"Dorothy Lee Bolden's emphasis on voting rights and equality was also heard loud and clear by another generation of community-minded Black leaders like voting rights activist and politician Stacey Abrams, whose 2018 gubernatorial campaign was strongly supported in Atlanta by the National Domestic Workers Alliance."

"I'm proud to be supporting Stacey Abrams for Governor of Georgia. She will make access to universal Pre-K a reality for Georgia’s children, raise the minimum wage, that currently at $5.15 an hour keeps families trapped in poverty, eliminate cash bail, and make sure people can participate in their government by introducing automatic voter registration."

"The minute the elections are over, the people who won—who did not share our values—are going to be working hard. We have to be working even harder."

"I’m proud to be part of a pantheon of elected leaders who, from around this country, found their voices and lifted up their communities. What we were able to do in Georgia was build an unprecedented multicultural, multiethnic coalition. We tripled Latino and Asian Pacific Islander participation. We increased youth participation by 139 percent. And we outperformed with African Americans and with white voters to numbers that haven’t been seen in Georgia before. And what that signals is that you can win in America, you can win in the Deep South, by talking to communities and engaging them where they are and treating them with the respect that every community deserves."

"I want us to understand that those who are on the sidelines, those who find their voices muted or find their voices actually silenced have power. And there is no more profound power in a democracy than the power to vote."

"We must remember that we’re in the state where the red clay gives life to generations of dreamers; a state where Martin marched on ballot boxes and challenged a nation’s conscience; a Georgia that gave us the Godfather of Soul, the queen of the Met, and sent a peanut farmer to the Oval Office. That is our Georgia."

"We have to give ourselves permission to want more...I think the first and most important foundational piece of advice is dream big. Think about what you want, and don’t let anyone tell you you can’t have it."

"It was an extraordinary night, not just for me and what it symbolized for women and women of color, but what it symbolizes for Georgia and for America. We’re changing the face of leadership in this country. And that means reflecting the very different experiences and lives that folks have, recognizing that that change is a good thing for Georgia and a good thing for America."

"There is nothing inherent in being a minority that says you can’t have everything you want."

"I’m running on very clear progressive values, Democratic values. We talk about educating children from cradle to career. And that’s something that resonated across the state of Georgia. We talk about a diverse and inclusive economy that works for every Georgian, no matter where you live."

"I built a campaign that’s been very different from a lot of campaigns that preceded me. Rather than spending a lot of money trying to convert Republicans into Democrats, I’m spending the bulk of our resources encouraging voters who share our values, Democratic-leaning voters and independent thinkers, so that they know that if they vote, they actually will get a different result. Because what’s really happened is that the unheard and unseen have given up. And I believe that with the right candidate and the right message and the right investment, we can turn them into active voters."

"When the Chinese do, in fact, usurp these ‘sparsely inhabited frontier mountain areas’ in Ladakh, Panditji, as we shall soon see, says, ‘Not a blade of grass grows there...’ Mahavir Tyagi, the MP, I am told, remarked, ‘Here, look at my head’—he was quite bald—‘not a blade of grass grows here. To whom is Jawaharlal gifting my head?’"

"Probably millions of men read or heard Mr. Lloyd's ideas without being aware of the real authorship. But I judge that with this condition he was well content. No man ever entered such a fight with a smaller share of personal vanity to gratify. He desired that his countrymen should be informed of existing conditions, but not that he himself should gain fame or rewards."

"Our system, so fair in its theory and so fertile in its happiness and prosperity in its first century, is now, following the fate of systems, becoming artificial, technical, corrupt; and, as always happens in human institutions, after noon, power is stealing from the many to the few."

"Believing wealth to be good, the people believed the wealthy to be good. But, again in history, power has intoxicated and hardened its possessors, and pharaohs are bred in counting-rooms as they were in palaces."

"We have chartered the self-interest of the individual as the rightful sovereign of conduct; we have taught that the scramble for profit is the best method of administering the riches of earth and the exchange of services. Only those can attack this system who attack its central principle, that strength gives the strong in the market the right to destroy his neighbor. Only as we have denied that right to the strong elsewhere have we made ourselves as civilized as we are."

"I spend every morning at my desk working on a book about the Trusts but my progress seems lamentably slow. However, it "do move." The worst of it is the work is really so distasteful. It keeps me poking about and scavengering in piles of filthy human greed and cruelty almost too nauseous to handle. Nothing but the sternest sense of duty and the conviction that men must understand the vices of our present system before they will be able to rise to a better, drives me back to my desk every day."

"The bottom truth is that Governor Altgeld is of that type whose brains and character alike do not make it possible for their personal success to suffocate their love of justice. He is a man whom the trusts, corporations, and concentrated millionairism of the country have found it impossible to bend, break, or seduce. If such men as Altgeld the Democrat and Pingree the Republican survive, monopoly will perish and monopoly by a sure instinct of self-preservation has set itself to destroy them by ridicule, slander, and by every means of financial and political assault. One of the most regrettable features of public opinion in this campaign is that so many of the American people have allowed themselves to be played upon by these sinister interests who are catering to every prejudice and using every ingenuity of misrepresentation to destroy public confidence in the few public men who are standing like giants on guard for the public."