Lawyers From The United States

"I don’t want to end up with more of what philanthropy has done to us, where philanthropy as an industry requires that there are always cash-poor and economically disenfranchised people. The non-profit industrial complex requires that there are always cash-poor and economically disenfranchised people. It is literally built upon people who — if suddenly there were no poor folks — they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves because their entire lives have been built upon this non-profit industrial complex. So, I think that there’s an economic injustice that we’ve allowed to exist for the sake of keeping the non-profit industrial complex going, keeping certain public projects going so we’re not actually invested in ending the actual injustice."

"I expected the age critiques and the experience critique, because I know that people do not value activism, organizing, or coalition building when it comes to public service. Even though that might be more valuable than career politician experience in the sense that career politicians often get so isolated from actual community members, so their ability to work in coalition — we’re usually convincing them to work with us."

"If u want ppl 2 deliver u groceries & goods but don't want to hold the corporations they work for accountable for PPE, thriving wages, hazard pay, & taxes, you're exploiting cheap labor for your own safety. We won't survive on exploitation. We only survive through solidarity."

"For all y'all talking about "we can't have lawlessness": What do you call it when cops murder without consequence? When a mayor violates the municipal code? Shouldn't the people in power be held to highest level of accountability when it comes to following the law?"

"We’re not trying to create a space that’s like how the world works. I’ve just learned time after time that when you allow a young person to actually make decisions about what is best for them, oftentimes in the long run, it actually is best for them. They know a lot about their daily lives. I only see them for four to five hours a week. Who am I to tell them what to do in those four to five hours?"

"One avenue is prevention, right? We need gun buyback programs. We need people doing street violence interruption programs. A second set of avenue is responding. So we have prevention and we have response. And response really is a local - is really a local endeavor. Sometimes it happens through these formal restorative justice processes. Sometimes it happens informally - right? - with the families trying to come together and mediate the conflict between those people, right? And then a lot of times it's not the case that they want people to go to prison. What victims and survivors often want is some measure for them to be heard, some level of accountability. And when we have more options than prison and police, that the survivors of harm and violence choose that - you know, for sexual violence and for homicides and attempted homicides, right?"

"(The police) arrest people. They give them gun charges. They put them in jail. The people go to jail or prison for a couple of years. They come back out; they have a record; they can't get a job; they're in the same set of circumstances. They need a gun to protect themselves because they can be robbed or they can be killed. And so you create a cycle of people who are going in and out of jail based on gun charges or homicide charges who ultimately never get to the root of the problem, right?"

"We live in a really messed up society. It’s not equitable. It is still very racist. And white supremacy is very present – and classism, and sexism, and homophobia and transphobia. All of those things permeate the many institutions that we move through, and that has deeply shaped my life, my work trajectory, the things that I do."

"I don't think I'm going to see the total eradication of police presence in my lifetime. I don't think my baby's going to see it in their lifetime. But what can happen in all of our lifetimes is the will and the commitment and the courage - right? - to have the courage to make sure that it does happen in the future."

"If you receive a medical diagnosis that was harmful and scary and you - and a doctor had to give you an answer in two minutes, that would be insufficient, right?"

"no community is a monolith. Whether we’re talking about white communities or Black communities or the Asian diaspora or Native communities, there is disagreement around a lot of things – gender, age, class. Going back to Ericka Huggins, that conversation was very formative for me, because I asked her, “How do I interact with elders I disagree with?” And she said, “You know, I had elders I disagreed with. This is a tale as old as time and is not a new thing. But are you moving in a principled way? Are you moving transparently? Are you being accountable? Is it really coming from a place that is grounded in a bigger vision of community care and wellbeing? Then keep moving in that way. If you’re not causing harm and what is being built is actually transformative, that will come out in the long run.”"

"One thing that we can do is make sure we have an avenue that prevents that violence from happening in the first place. Police do not prevent that violence. They make people more precarious. And then once they exit jail if they are arrested, they go back to the same circumstances where they then have to protect themselves."

"police abolition is not mere police absence, all right? It's not just the disappearance of police. Just like slavery abolition just didn't mean that slaves would disappear, it means that we will fight to create a society where Black people can live with dignity and freedom and peace and justice and build the kind of relationships and communities that they deserve, right? So that's a complete restructuring of what we understand the United States to mean at that time."

"One reason why I love defund the police is because it's a policy demand. It's actually a policy demand. One critique of Black Lives Matter from people who are sympathetic to its cause is that it didn't mean anything. Where is the policy? Where is the plan? What are you really asking for? Black Lives Matter is just a slogan. And so then, you know, six years later, in 2020, instead of saying Black Lives Matter, people started saying take away resources from the police as a very specific policy demand, well, now that's much harder to co-opt. We're hearing people say, well, this is the policy that we want. We want you to take away resources from the police, and we want you to invest it in all of the other resources that make us safe. We want better schools. We want better housing. We want health care. We want quality jobs. We want to be able to work with dignity. We want child care. We want our student debt canceled. So we want to remove resources from the carceral state and pour into all of these other avenues that make us live healthy lives full of dignity and joy."

"why all these killings happening in the first place? Why are people conditioned to kill each other? Why is it true in the United States but not true in other parts of the world?"

"The police can't fight patriarchy. They perpetuate it in so many circumstances."

"if we truly want to undermine and reduce homicides, we have to reduce our reliance on police."

"why do we have to run from cops in our neighborhood and then go to school and run from, quote, "school resource officers," unquote, in order to learn, in order to get an education?...I watched that from sixth grade all the way until I graduated high school."

"A lot of the times the people who make the decision to kill people - if they make that decision, it's because of patriarchy. It's because they're trying to control someone else's sexuality, especially if it's a woman, and they are concerned about, she's going to sleep with someone else - or if they're concerned someone else is going to try to sleep with her. So then that leads to a homicide. Or it's two men who are fighting or going back and forth, and one feels as if their manhood has been disrespected. And so we see the No. 1 reason for certain kind of homicides is a petty argument that escalates."

"as a trained lawyer, what I try to do is use my legal skills to help organizers figure out how to wage campaigns against oppressive institutions. Sometimes that means reducing power for the police. Sometimes it means trying to close a jail or a prison."

"writing, to me, is so important 'cause it allows me to think publicly about ideas that I'm working through as a lawyer or I'm working through as an organizer or as I'm working through as a parent, for example."

"I hope that more people are being called to be molders of that society, molders of that consensus, instead of just reflecting the current consensus that we have - because that's where all the oppression lives."

"we called 911 because it was often the default response to a lot of harm that we were facing in our homes, in our families when fights broke out, when someone needed medical assistance. It was the only resource, and so it became the default resource. There were no clinics in my neighborhood, no grocery stores. The last grocery store in that neighborhood closed down in the year 2000. There hasn't been a fresh food source since, right? And so there were all these unhealthy, toxic pieces of our environment that made us sick that - there were stressors that made us fight. So 911 became the go-to response to solve a lot of these crises that could have been prevented."

"We’re not going to get to a place of change or transformation if we only want to engage in things that make us comfortable. As a non-binary person, very little about, I don’t know, going to buy clothes feels comfortable. Who decided that because you have X genitals that you needed to do X thing or act X way? I spent a lot of my life very uncomfortable in my body and very uncomfortable with what I was told was the expectation for me as a “woman.” When I finally came to the understanding that is actually not who or what I am and chose to move honestly, I started to feel more free, but also other people felt more uncomfortable."

"people who move through the world without the privilege you have are uncomfortable, probably every minute of the day, but are actively choosing to be their liberated self. They make it possible for everyone else to live more honestly, even if that means we live more uncomfortably."

"The current system expects activists, organizers and abolitionists to do it 100% perfect right now with limited resources. While the flawed racist system has been doing it imperfectly for hundreds of years while exploiting us and our resources. Things I think about..."

"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."

"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.""

"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.""

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Shall we not then have women school trustees and superintendents? Already they are appointed in the East and in the West, and women are permitted to vote at the school elections. Who has a deeper interest in the schools than the mothers?"

"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."

"Your favor containing the question, as to whether I consider myself a "new woman" is before me. As a rule I do not consider myself at all. I am, and always have been a progressive woman, and while never directly attacking the conventionalities of society, have always done, or attempted to do those things which I have considered conducive to my health, convenience or emolument, as for instance: Attended college and graduated when the general sentiment of the people was against it, and this after I had been a married woman. Entered a law school and graduated, at a time when there was much opposition to such. Applied for, and was admitted ultimately to the United States Supreme Court. Such a course had been previously unknown in our history. I was the first woman to ride a wheel in the District of Columbia, which I persisted in doing notwithstanding newspaper comments. I accepted a nomination to the Presidency by the Equal Rights Party, and my letter of acceptance was published throughout the length and breadth of 2 worlds. I do not believe in sex distinction in literature, law, politics, or trade; or that modesty and virtue are more becoming to women than to men; but wish we had more of it everywhere. I was new about 60 years ago, but did not then appreciate my privileges. Yours truly, Belva A. Lockwood."

"Peace is a matter of education more largely than of legislation; although the latter is necessary."

"No thoughtful person, no humane person, believes in war, which destroys everything and creates nothing but hatred. We believe and teach peace and arbitration in the home, in the church, in society, in the State, and between nations. We believe in the sanctity of human life, the inalienable rights of individuals, in justice, in equality and fraternity. Our Government has already settled many serious difficulties with the various nations of the world by arbitration and by treaty, without resort to war and without bloodshed, and the expense of all of them combined has not been one-tenth that of the War of the Revolution."

"Organization is the hope of the world, and woman the elastic cement that is binding organizations together, and by them and through them we hope soon to hold the banner aloft to the nations of the world, proclaiming the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man."

"Our Congress, without any danger of war unless we provoke one by meddling, are continuously making appropriations for war ships to strengthen our Navy, in order to protect long stretches of sea coast, that no nation has the remotest idea of attacking, or to protect our foreign commerce, which has recently grown so small that one would need a microscope to discover it. These large naval appropriations furnish very good jobs for the young men who graduate at Annapolis; and glory for the Secretary of the Navy, who is usually anxious to magnify himself and his office. So the money of the people is spent for a costly vessel that will usually stand the strain of one peaceful cruise at sea, providing there are no storms, and then go to the dry dock for repairs. These appropriations are not only useless, but positively harmful, for they at once alarm our European friends, and incite them to a greater increase of their military and naval appropriations."