Activists From The United States

"New possibilities develop through taking action. We can't conjure strategy out of isolation;"

"STUDY HISTORY AND POLITICAL THEORY RELENTLESSLY. We do ourselves no favors by being ignorant of the past experiences and summations of those who came before us."

"We need to build a multi-tendency alliance if we're going to win, that embraces reds, greens, anarchists, anti-oppression activists of all kinds."

"Most of us in the US don't understand populism or many other concepts relevant to political struggle. Even those of us who are active lag far behind much of the world in our grasp of theory-we don't recognize views as coherent lines, and therefore we're incapable of calling them by name, much less foreseeing their far-ranging implications. But we can't keep blithely disdaining the use of "jargon." These words may feel cumbersome and persnickety in our casual, 140-characters-or-less, news-o-tainment culture, but their precision allows us to conceptualize, identify, and decide to accept or reject ideological and political phenomena that could make all the difference to our eventual success or failure."

"We need to make land public, and collectively controlled by the people. The system wants us to be sick and dysfunctional; we need to take control of our health and not accept toxic food."

"Today there are ever-increasing numbers of people doing this, which is very encouraging. But if we are to find viable solutions, we must do more than describe symptoms and warn of dire consequences. We must get to the root of the problem: figure out how to end global capitalism and eliminate the class divisions that enable private wealth accumulation."

"Exposing capitalism's effects, such as global warming and pollution, is one crucial part of building a movement to transform society. That was my goal with these cartoons when I drew them during the years 2009-2012."

"Profiteers will never change through persuasion. Only by all of us stepping up to build a broad mass movement, with workers in the lead, can we become strong enough to challenge, defeat and overthrow the class currently in power."

"it's only when we can collectively provide for our own needs that we can break our dependency on the capitalist system and create an alternative to it that works."

"This generation of young people ...music and pop culture has been pretty anti-intellectual. That's a hard thing to overcome."

"It's not hard to formulate an opinion on things. It's hard to make the viewer or reader [feel] validated. You've got to give them the jokes. Funny is a rare gift.... Early on, I erred on the side of message-driven. Those are the mistakes you learn from. The second season of the show, we tried to make that adjustment."

"Satire is the least commercially viable form of comedy. ... There really is a distaste for being preached at. People have a very low tolerance for it -- newspaper audiences have a way higher tolerance for it than others. But it's tough on TV."

"Everyone sits at home with their political opinions. The important thing is making it as funny as possible and knowing when to pull back on the message for the sake of the message...But it can never just [be about the jokes] for me. I'm not like a funny person. I'm not like a comedian. I have things I want to say. ... Bill Maher does find a nice balance between the jokes and tackling the serious issues. So few outlets [offer] those issues in a serious fashion."

"Good satire goes beyond the specific point it's trying to make and teaches you how to think critically."

"Because a capitalist economy compels perpetual growth, no reforms or adjustments can make it sustainable."

"We need to take back the means of subsistence that they tore from us-for most of us, many generations ago. We need access to land, and to reconnect with the living world in mutually beneficial ways, re-learn how to live within (and preserve the health of) our bioregions."

"what is certain is that the structural crises and inequalities that gave rise to the global uprisings in the first place will only intensify."

"Well the only way for you to know (my thoughts on political questions) would be through The Boondocks. I decided a long time ago to stop engaging in the conversation. If I had anything worthwhile to say, I should say it in the work."

"I think I'm a better writer now than when I started. I certainly know more about producing and working with actors. You take every single bit of it into the next project."

"My favorite thing is Stephen Colbert -- he's a genius. It's great to watch Colbert and think: How does he keep that pace up? That's an amazing amount of work. He's really doing something special. This particular election, it keeps you sane [to watch him], when watching TV news makes you want to throw out your television. ... This [election] has become like a reality show that I'm way too invested in."

"I went in knowing the show couldn't be the strip, aside from the topicality. Those jokes don't "land" at all on television. We didn't re-create the strip on TV -- we wanted to keep the characters the same but make it stand on its own. That's hard -- we certainly didn't get it right away. We struggled with Huey for a long time. Granddad just worked right from the bat. A lot of those Season One episodes were really rough. ... That first season was rough. it almost killed me and everyone around me."

"Life runs much faster than our ability to record and interpret it."

"The development from uprising to revolution is never linear or smooth. Ebb must follow surge, yielding ground temporarily in order to consolidate power for the next wave."

"I had gotten really good at just shutting it all out because you couldn’t possibly get any work done and track all of this trouble you were getting into and who was saying what."

"the Tuskegee Airmen who were heroes to me most of my life."

"my first memory in life was three years old: my dad took me to see Star Wars and it's not just the first movie I remember, it's my first memory. If you ever watch Boondocks, a lot of times it does become more of an action comedy than just a pure comedy. I've always had a passion for all that"

"As I grew up I developed an interest in Garry Trudeau, and that's what took me into the direction of being a syndicated cartoonist."

"My issues (with cartooning) were totally about: one, I just burnt out on the strip and the deadlines were brutal. Two, I didn't feel like there was much of a future in print. I thought I needed to quit because I saw the newspapers slowly going away. I didn't want to be caught off guard. I felt more comfortable being a screenwriter, and as I learned how to become a producer, it seemed like a more natural fit for me than cartooning. I still do animation, and I think animation will always be a part of what I do, but I'm trying to do more live-action stuff and I think that's really going to be my focus."

"You go to Comic-Con and see a cross section of everybody. It used to be niche, and now it's so enormous that it's hard to categorize. But ultimately, the epicenter of who's creating this stuff still ends up being the comic book companies, the Hollywood movies or whatever. All of that is very much white male-centered."

"It's a world that accepts people more for who they are, and whoever you are, at this point, you can find your thing."

"{{cite news"

"what spurred and motivated a lot of people to very good organizing, starting with Bob Bullard’s Dumping in Dixie exposé of how environmental racism was encountered with impunity by these big corporations throwing lead, and you name it, various carcinogens into people’s water tables and so on and so forth."

"academics continue to play a crucial supporting role through such institutions as the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark-Atlanta University, founded and run by Robert Bullard, and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Xavier University in New Orleans, run by Beverly Hendrix Wright. These centers, and others like them, provide crucial research that aids local struggles, as well as train a new generation of professionals of color."

"Hazel M. Johnson's work helped lay the groundwork for climate justice around the world, as well as for an intersectional approach to environmentalism...Another pivotal voice in environmental justice history is its "father," as he's often dubbed, Dr. Robert Bullard... In 1979, Dr. Bullard wrote "Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community," one of the first studies to demonstrate the link between toxic waste locations and race...In his own words, environmental justice can be defined as a concept that "embraces the principles that all communities, all people, are entitled to equal protection of our environmental laws, health laws, housing laws, transportation laws, and civil rights laws.""

"No community, rich or poor, urban or suburban, black or white, should be made into a sacrifice zone or dumping ground."

"Poor people and poor communities are given a false choice between having, on the one hand, no jobs and no development and, on the other hand, risky low-paying jobs and pollution. In reality, unemployment and poverty are also hazardous to one's health. This jobs-versus-unemployment scenario is a form of economic blackmail."

"With its bottom-up approach, this movement has re-defined the term "environment" to include the places where people live, work, play, and go to school, as well as brought attention to how these things interact with the physical and natural world."

"The (environmental justice) movement has come a long way since its humble beginnings in Warren County, North Carolina, a rural and mostly African American community, where a proposed landfill for disposing of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) ignited protests that resulted in more than five hundred arrests. These protests prompted a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office, Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities. This study revealed that three of the four off-site, commercial hazardous waste landfills in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Region 4 (composed of eight southern states) happen to be located in predominantly African American communities, although African Americans made up only 20 percent of the region's population. The protesters of Warren County put the term "environmental racism" on the map."

"Waiting for government to act is recipe for disaster."

"Students and young people have fueled every social movement in the United States, including the civil rights, environmental, antiwar, women's movements."

"Where did this term (Environmental Racism) come from? In 1979, the Northeast Community Action Group (NECAG), a group of Black suburban homeowners in a middle-class enclave in Houston, came together to prevent the city from building a landfill near their neighborhood. The group launched a civil rights suit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc., under the legal direction of Linda McKeever Bullard. A report produced in 1979 in support of the lawsuit found that for decades, Houston had built over 80 percent of its landfills and incinerators in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Bullard's husband, Dr. Robert Bullard, began documenting eco-racism cases throughout the city, then throughout the South, and eventually throughout the nation. Their collective actions became a breakthrough moment for fighting environmental decisions as violations of civil rights...As Dr. Bullard points out, inequities sometimes occur as a matter of class, and thus may be directly targeted at white neighborhoods. "Now all of the issues of environmental racism and environmental justice don't just deal with people of color. We are just as much concerned with inequities in Appalachia, for example, where the whites are basically dumped on because of lack of economic and political clout and lack of having a voice to say 'no," he stated in an Earth First! interview."

"I saw that 100 percent of all the city-owned landfills in Houston were in black neighborhoods, though blacks made up only 25 percent of the population. Three out of four of the privately owned landfills were located in predominantly black neighborhoods, and six out of eight of the city-owned incinerators. In a city that does not have zoning, it meant that these were decisions made by individuals in government."

"we will have more hurricanes. We will have more floods. But the thing is, how do we—how do we build, rebuild in a way that will make our city more resilient?"

"It’s not just the landfill, it’s not just the incinerator, it’s not just the garbage dump, it’s not just the crisscrossing freeway and highway, and the bus barns that dump all that stuff in these neighborhoods — it’s all that combined. Even if each particular facility is in compliance, there are no regulations that take into account this saturation. It may be legal, but it is immoral. Just like slavery was legal, but slavery has always been immoral."

"billions come flowing in (after a disaster), and then you have all kinds of organizations and individuals parachuting in, raking up the money, I mean, when the local groups that have been working on these issues for years and years and years somehow get bypassed, get left behind."

"The gentrification that oftentimes occurs in many of our communities, it occurs at the—I guess, the detriment of communities that have historically lived in those areas...we have to say that we want to make sure that we redevelop and we develop our communities in a way that minimizes displacement of incumbent residents, and also ensure that those residents who want to remain in those older neighborhoods that are undergoing transformation, that they can. And those who want to leave, by choice, can leave."

"community organizations, institutions, that have been doing this work in the city for many, many years, they need to be funded. They need to have—they need capacity to staff up and to start doing the kind of work, because they have the trust and because they have the experience and because they are here, they are local."

"This whole question of environment, economics, and equity is a three-legged stool. If the third leg of that stool is dealt with as an afterthought, that stool won’t stand. The equity components have to be given equal weight. But racial and economic and social equity can be very painful topics: people get uncomfortable when questions of poor people and race are raised."

"I started—my first job out of graduate school in 1976 was at Texas Southern University in 1976. I was a young, untenured professor in sociology in 1976. And two years out of graduate school, I was asked to collect data for a lawsuit, by my wife, who had filed a lawsuit suing the city of Houston, Harris County and the state of Texas. And I worked for a state university, so my wife actually sued my employer. And so I had 10 students in my graduate class. We collected data for a lawsuit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corporation. That was the first lawsuit in the country that was challenging environmental discrimination using a civil rights law. And it was basically challenging the location of a municipal landfill that was being proposed in a black, middle-class, suburban neighborhood in Houston. Nothing out in that northeast Houston neighborhood except trees, houses and black people—not a likely place for a landfill. And I collected data for that lawsuit, and we wrote studies. And that’s how I, you know, started working on this. And five out of five of the city-owned landfills were located in black neighborhoods. Six out of eight of the city-owed incinerators were located in black neighborhoods. And three out of four of the privately owned landfills were located in black neighborhoods. Eighty-two percent of all the waste garbage dumped in Houston, from 1930s up 'til 1978, were dumped in black neighborhoods. And blacks only made up 25 percent of the population. For me, that was eye-opening. That's what sent me on my way."

"when you talk about all of the potential health threats and the potential damage not just damage to property and the tax base in terms of people’s houses, lowering the property values, but you’re also talking about schools and playgrounds that are located so close, you would say, “Who would do this?” And the idea of environmental justice and environmental racism and the fact that communities of color are disproportionately impacted by these things, not just in Houston, but that’s a national trend—and what we say—people are saying no. Communities have a right to say no, and they have a right to equal protection under the law, and they have a right not to have their children go to school or play on playgrounds that’s not impacted by pollution."