social-justice

"It's really important that the movement be intergenerational."

"AOC embodies the kind of leadership we dream of: brilliant, courageous, and gifted, with a quick mind and an understanding of our history and the political moment from which she emerged. And most importantly to me, she believes in environmental justice."

"We try really hard to not only make sure that we're centered on the matriarchal, but that we are willing to engage in self-transformation. To be introspective and to challenge each other and ourselves; to be not only accountable to each other but to be tender and kind. That may sound like the soft stuff, but that's hard stuff when you think about how colonized we've been and what our education has prepared us to be."

"Another example of green colonialism is what happens to a community when you have invested in environmental amenities, like doubling the amount of open space, expanding the median on Fourth Avenue, reducing emissions—doing all the things to make the community more environmentally sound. All of a sudden the community can't afford to live here anymore. The people that benefit are not [from] our community."

"The conventional, dated, old ways of thinking will not be able to address the challenges of climate change."

"When I first came into the environmental justice movement, it felt very patriarchal. And it felt patriarchal coming from women, too, where it was competitive and everybody was sort of jousting to be at the front of the room and get all the shine. It doesn't feel the same in the climate justice space. Everyone shares shine. Everybody shares leadership."

"We're the descendants of enslavement and colonization, we are people who come from people who've always honored Mother Earth. This climate justice work is just an extension of us honoring those traditions."

"I think that people sometimes think of mentoring as something that older women do for younger women. They don't realize that we really do learn from each other across generations. There are times when I'm in a space with someone who's 19 years old or much younger than me, and I'm listening and learning and changing. I've changed the way that I communicate. I've changed the way that I think about gender. I've changed the way that I think about so many things because younger people have taught me."

"I grew up in a predominantly Black and Latine community where gang violence was common. My parents grew up in El Salvador, and when they took me to visit, I was struck by the level of poverty I saw. I saw that no matter where in the world my people go, they're exposed to varying levels of injustice. And I knew I had to do something about it, so I decided to write."

"My greatest hope is the youth. They see the issue for what it is. They see it through this racial lens. They understand all the ways it's set to impact their lives, their futures, the world."

"Elizabeth Yeampierre helped welcome and support many of her fellow Puerto Ricans when they arrived in the United States. But when I spoke with her on the island, she said that her "biggest fear" is that the evacuation will be a prelude to a massive land grab. "What they want is our land, and they just don't want our people in it.""

"We won't have power if we don't have intergenerational power. That's not just rhetoric. We can solve problems when we're together."

"Today, companies in the Climate Leadership Council—BP, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips—are going into the Global South to provide resources to these communities so that they can engage in sequestration. To me, that's green colonialism. You basically have these companies that are responsible for creating the conditions the Global South is enduring now benefiting from this."

"Young people come with hope and with a renewed vision of a future that transforms."

"My fear is that we won't act quickly enough to leave a habitable world for the youth working so hard to save it. After all, it can't be all on them. They inherited this mess. The adults in the room created it."

"Women's History Month, for me, is like Black History Month in the sense that it's every day. It's not just a month, but it's a life. And it makes me think about my maternal ancestors. It makes me think about all the women who mentored me on my journey to the work that I'm doing and played such a major part in my development, my political understanding, and my cultural grounding. It makes me think about all of them, and I hope that everything that I do honors them."

"New York City is like the bastion of capitalism and patriarchy."

"When I was little, my hero was Lolita Lebrón. And then growing up, Antonia Pantoja, Iris Morales, Esmeralda Simmons, Marta Moreno Vega, Esperanza Martell… These are all women who, from the time I was in my late teens through now, mentored me and guided me—who would pull my coat, who would give me a different perspective. I try to be to another generation of women what they were to me. Through storytelling, they would sit down with me and walk me through all kinds of scenarios so that I would be able to anchor myself culturally and politically. And I will always be in deep gratitude for them because they were my education. They were so necessary for my political development—and also for my fearlessness. I would add my mom to that. They did that for me as a young woman. Lolita Lebron was a fighter for independence of Puerto Rico. I, as a little girl, wanted to be able to lead a revolution for freedom in Puerto Rico. Little kids have different dreams, but when I was eight-years old, I'm watching the Young Lords on TV, and I'm hearing about Lolita Lebrón, and I was like That's who I want to be. Antonia Pantoja passed away. She was the creator of a lot of our institutions. Marta Moreno Vega founded a bunch of institutions. Iris Morales was a Young Lord. Esperanza Martell is a healer and a shaman in our community."

"I didn't come to this work with a degree in environmental policy. It happened organically: as a child, my family was displaced so often that I went to eight schools in five years. I remember walking past the burning embers on Simpson Street in the South Bronx. I had no idea then that we were living in the midst of brownfields, contaminated lots with lead, asbestos, PCBs, arsenic, and other toxics and toxicants that seeped through our walls as fugitive dust and landed in our developing lungs. Families like mine all over New York City were the targets of government and developer-driven-planned shrinkage public policies created to deny our communities basic services in order to encourage our departure. The New York City environmental justice movement was born and raised in the midst of this rubble."

"Elizabeth Yeampierre, who attended the Mariana summit, believes that despite all the devastation being visited on Puerto Rico, her people have the fortitude for the battles ahead. "I see a level of resistance and support that I didn't imagine was going to be possible," she said. "And it reminds me that these are the descendants of colonization and slavery, and they are strong.""

"Climate justice is racial justice. The climate crisis has always been an issue embedded in systemic racism. Where can we find fossil fuel infrastructure? In communities of color. All the pollutants and toxins those refineries and power plants emit harm the Black and brown communities nearby. Black people, in particular, have borne an unfair burden from the drivers of climate change. Changing this isn't simple. It's not something we can just snap our fingers, and it'll be gone. Solving this will require a complete transformation of social policies. All that money cities and counties spend on their police departments? They can invest it in Black communities to build public transit infrastructure, bike lanes, clean energy projects. That'll take some serious political will. While it's growing, it's not growing nearly fast enough to save the lives of the people climate change is set to harm first and worst."

"Vote! What we need is systemic change, and that'll only happen if the right people are in office. So vote! Or if you can't vote, contribute to get-out-the-vote campaigns. Phone bank. Post to social media. Call your local representatives. Make change happen on a bigger level than yourself. Definitely do your part, too, but know that's not enough. Not at this point. The situation is too far gone to rely on individuals to clean this up. It's up to world leaders to enact policy that'll end fossil fuels for good and create a just, sustainable world for us all."

"For a long time, environmental justice was kept separate from the environment at large. It's become "mainstream" only recently, so it just wasn't something the general public–including reporters—really knew about. We see that slowly changing, and we're seeing more environmental reporters become more sophisticated in their understanding of environmental issues and how they impact communities of color. I pursued this because I was, first, interested in racial justice. I knew I wanted to be a reporter that uncovered societal harms right away, but it was only when I realized the severity of the climate crisis that I bridged those two interests together. Once I found out what "environmental justice" was, it was a wrap. I knew that was the beat for me. And it was clear to me that there weren't enough reporters out there covering it."

"For me, seeing energy and organizing from young people is incredibly motivating. I grew up feeling ambivalent to the world. I knew things were wrong, but I saw no way to change it beyond writing and reporting. The next generation can't afford such feelings of defeat. They're tackling the climate crisis from all angles, and it's so inspiring."

"Climate change is unlike any other threat in our history. It will test us in unimaginable ways. It demands leadership that celebrates difference, sees the frontline as partners in decision-making, and is willing to exercise courage for all of us."

"Perspectives of whiteness echo, largely unacknowledged, through transgender theorizing."

"The universal body of the human without a race is already de facto occupied by the unmarked white body in narratives of transcendence like American “post-racial” discourse."

"Whiteness stands in as a universal in canonical theorizing on gender and sexuality."

"The justification and maintenance of a slave economy required the construction and defense of an elaborate cultural system. Literally everything—laws, religious beliefs and practices, educational systems—had to be carefully organized in order to maintain a brutal and utterly unnatural system. This included the careful cultivation of the White psyche so that White people could accept the brutality with which they were surrounded and in which they participated on a regular basis. In other words, to accept what was going on around them, White people had to be formed in a very particular way, that is, they had to be enculturated into whiteness."

"Gender norms so often remain predicated on an unremarkable whiteness."

"With the rise of color-blind racial ideology, many people stopped using overtly racial language, but the culture into which they were assimilated remained the same in every other way. After all, at no point in the history of this country have White people on a societal level asked the questions, “Who have we become?"

"When we first started Black Lives Matter, I always knew that this needed to be a global movement and that we needed more people to participate. The issues of police brutality, extrajudicial killings and anti-Black racism requires everybody to pay attention."

"We are finally achieving a mass consciousness. We're seeing a widespread awareness and commitment to anti-racism that we have long needed. People are now alert and active because the pandemic demonstrated how interconnected our lives are. We finally had time to sit at home and reflect on how our society functions and whether or not it's functioning well for all of us. The overwhelming consensus was that it is not, it is insufficient – in fact, it's been unsustainable for decades, if not generations."

"People have begun to engage in mutual aid and support for their neighbours. Even if people didn't have much, they were still looking out for each other. Through this, we began to see the ways in which new webs were being constructed. When you're sitting at home or living at a slower pace and you see that Black folks in your community are attacked, killed, murdered by vigilantes and by the police, you wake up, you rise to action, and you rise quickly."

"There [was] a lot of rage, a lot of pain, a lot of cynicism. But her (Garza's) post resonated with me, for a number of reasons. I think it being explicitly black, it being a message rooted in love, and it just felt very hopeful."

"Voices on the left, voices on the right... What I’ve not heard is a unanimous commitment to atone for the sins of this country. ... It was an 18-year fight to (make) Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. ... Systemic racism can have an ending. Police brutality can have an ending. Economic repression of Black and brown people can have an ending. ... A movement without action is a movement standing still. To those who say they care: Move more than your mouth. ... Black lives do matter. And this is not another digital, viral trend, moment or hashtag. ... Yes, all lives do matter, but they only matter when black lives matter too."

"I think about issues like climate change, and how six of the 10 worst impacted nations by climate change are actually on the continent of Africa... in Haiti is that they were actually facing a number of challenges that even preceded this hurricane. They were reeling from the earthquake, they were reeling from cholera that was brought in by UN peacekeepers and still hasn't been eradicated. This is unconscionable. And this would not happen if this nation didn't have a population that was black, and we have to be real about that."

"I absolutely think people are concerned with police brutality. Let me make that absolutely clear. We have been fighting and advocating to stop a war on black lives. And that is how we see it—this is a war on black life."

"We are now in a moment where people have no excuses to deny the injustice that's happening in the middle of a global pandemic. Things feel different this time because we were able to tap into a sense of our own agency, our own power and our genuine love for each other."

"In 2016 the Black Lives Matter movement has consolidated this sense of a leaderless movement with foot soldiers in every corner of the land. Some of them are indeed sitting in and marching and campaigning, but it's my sense that many more have taken the message and applied it in disparate ways to their daily practice. I see black hair, in its natural state-free of endpapers-springing out of all the scalps of my friends and students and myself. I see kids expanding the old strictures of the hip-hop aesthetic into Afro-punk and Afro-weird and black-girl-magic and every kind of hyphenated existence. And I see the walk. I see folks making a lot of a little."

"Remove the word black and say 'lives matter'. ... Stop sending mothers back home empty. You can never replace a mother's child. If we want black lives matter, let's make it matter to us. That's the new call."

"Antiblack racism is not only happening in the United States. It's actually happening all across the globe. And what we need now more than ever is a human rights movement that challenges systemic racism in every single context. ... We need this because the global reality is that black people are subject to all sorts of disparities in most of our most challenging issues of our day."

"One thing I just want to underscore is that the world is watching us. We see these rallies in solidarity emerging all across the globe. ... I think they have been not O.K. for so many years, and they are finally saying, “Hey, we are going to take it to the streets and say we are going to show up in solidarity with you.”"

"High school students have organized protests in California, Maryland and Michigan. In one Texas suburb, three teenagers led hundreds of people in a march, and they say they aren’t done organizing. In early June, as outrage over racism and police brutality erupted nationwide, three teenagers from Katy, Texas, grew frustrated by a void of activism in their affluent Houston suburb. They banded together under the name Katy4Justice. Over four days, through text messages and video chats, they organized a protest at a neighborhood park, leading hundreds of people in a march through soccer fields and picnic areas in the summer heat... “Katy loves to think it’s progressive and stuff, but nothing ever happens,” said Erika Alvarez, 17, one of the three organizers, all of whom will start their senior year in the fall. Jeffrey Jin, 17, concurred. “It’s very all talk and no do... There’s a lot of white silence.”...The youth-led protest in Katy is representative of the way the nationwide demonstrations after George Floyd’s death have energized a diverse cohort of the youngest generation. In recent weeks, high school students have led protests in Greenville, Mich.; Laurel, Md.; and Berkeley, Calif. Several teenagers, including those in Katy, said that it was the first time they had organized any sort of demonstration — and that it would not be the last. In Katy, the students’ activism was years in the making, they said, shaped by their own experiences with racism."

"Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter. Black Lives Matter. We see black death all the time, and I don’t know what it was about this, but I know I went home and then I woke up in the middle of the night crying. And I picked up my phone and I started clickety-clacking, right? ... Patrisse and I, we started talking about building an organizing project around state violence."

"We know that young people are the present and the future, but what inspires me are older people who are becoming transformed in the service of this movement. ... I'm inspired by seeing older people step into their own power and leadership and say, "I'm not passing a torch, I'm helping you light the fire.""

"An 11-year-old boy is doing a small part to make a big change when it comes to social justice. Jack Powers recently started mowing lawns around his neighborhood to raise money, but the sixth-grader from Missouri isn't using the extra cash to buy the latest video game or gadget. Instead, he's donating it to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has been behind the nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd on May 25. “I just wanted to make a change and I didn't like how people were being treated,” Jack told KMOV. “I saw what happened to George Floyd and saw how people were being treated, and I decided to make a change,” he told the news station."

"I was struck again by the importance of language and of words that need to be spoken. Our best teachers, including Audre Lorde among others, have imparted this truth. In the last few months, weeks, and days, I have found myself saying #BlackLivesMatter out loud at various times. It's not that I don't already know that they do. I think that I am trying to speak the words into existence."

"Civil-rights organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi put those three words into our minds and hearts seven years ago, when they began to change the country. The sweeping calls for change we see today are not sudden, but the fruits of the labor of activists like them. Their work has given us room to demand more, because black lives don’t truly matter just because people simply say so. This year alone, a white father and son carried out the modern-day lynching of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery near Brunswick, Georgia. If black lives mattered by now, we wouldn’t have to say the name of Breonna Taylor, lost to a hail of police bullets in her own home in Louisville in March. Or chant the name of Floyd, killed for allegedly spending a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill at a corner grocery... Accountability after the fact used to be the most that I once hoped for, as a black man just living and trying to survive. Wishing for the cops not to target me indiscriminately felt almost like too much to ask. But I must be honest: If this era of Black Lives Matter activism has not resulted in the kinds of changes to America that would ensure my safety, then it has made me feel more secure in demanding those concessions from my country."

"We now have the conceptual means to engage in discussions, popular discussions, about capitalism... The notion of the prison-industrial complex requires us to understand the globalization of capitalism. Anti-capitalist consciousness helps us to understand the predicament of immigrants, who are barred from the U.S. by the wall that has been created by the current occupant. These conditions have been created by global capitalism. And I think this is a period during which we need to begin that process of popular education, which will allow people to understand the interconnections of racism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism."