Women Authors From The United States

"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."

"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?"

"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 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."

"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."

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

"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."

"The stories that always interested me were about people and how people were being affected by industry. So like human rights violations at the hands of U.S. and Canadian mining companies, things like that I found myself not being able to explore as much as I wanted to."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"To be able to cover immigration and really focus on the human stories because of the fact that [KPBS] is an NPR and PBS affiliate, we’re public radio so I’m able to cover really whatever I want. The stories that speak the most to me are the human stories."

"I feel like like this whole notion of crossing borders appeals to me because curiosity is basically, no one is curious unless they admit that they don’t know something. You will not explore beyond your world unless your recognize that there lies more beyond your world worth exploring."

"I’ve been following one family that, a father had his one year-old baby taken away from him months ago and just [a week ago] he was reunited finally, after eight months in detention. So I followed that story. We put out the story of their reunification but it’s like the struggle for the family is nowhere near over. The little boy is severely traumatized because he was kept in a tender age facility that has since closed for more than a thousand abuses ranging from inappropriate sexual contact between staff and the children to harsh punishment. It’s incredible, so I’ve been following the reunification of families, in particular this one family that has been so traumatized. I don’t know if you saw the question about “where are the girls,” because the government was conducting tours of child migrant shelters but nowhere were the girls visible. So I found one the girls’ shelter in San Diego and I put out a story on that and now I’m finding another one and it’s just never ending. It’s just crazy."

"I think that my book is relevant to the current, you know, alternative-facts-post-truth situation that we're seeing, not only because of the way that my father as a character plays into this whole discussion, but also because I feel like one of the reasons that we fall into these echo chambers and stop listening to one another is because we think that we have to have all of the answers. And we think that the answers are simpler than they really are. And so what I discovered through the writing of the book was that, wow, OK, so multiple explanations can be true to some extent. And I think that, in that sense, this discovery that I went through in the book can sort of inform and help people sort of let go of this obsession with having just one answer."

"I think that what needs to change is just this idea that we have of someone, you know, when somebody teaches us how to say their name, we shouldn't see it as a burden. And I think we often do see it as a burden, but we should see it as a gift. I think it's a beautiful gift to learn how to say somebody's name."

"One thing that hasn't really been discussed in this whole debate on family separations, which I've been following, is there's a family separation practice that predates the Trump administration. It's been going on for years, and it continues to go on. And it's basically this tendency for Homeland Security to prioritize women and children for release on parole while locking up the fathers in detention."

"Writing fiction allows us to dream aloud, to dream onto pages that we hope others will read, and to craft worlds we hope others will visit. We are already dreaming beyond this current moment, these crises, these norms. Dreams are the foundation for what we attempt to turn into reality. Democracy was a dream (and some might argue it still is in most places, even for those who claim to be practicing it); the abolition of slavery was a dream (and some should argue it still is, while the prison industrial complex thrives); every garden we find nourishing was first a dream."

"Mariame Kaba has given incredible talks about this, that we've had 250 years of this well-funded prison system experiment. And it hasn't stopped rape. It hasn't stopped robberies. It hasn't stopped drugs. It hasn't stopped anything at all. All of those things that we think of as harm, they continue without the responses they need...One of the other things that Mariame points out—what would it look like if the experiment of transformative justice was as well funded as the experiment of prison? We have no idea what things could look like at scale because we've never actually had the resources to even experiment at any kind of scale. We’ve had to argue over every penny."

"So, for example, if a family comes to the border and ask for asylum, often the women and children will be released on parole, and the father will be locked up in detention. And, to me, as someone who experienced personally the trauma of having an absent father, it's very bizarre and ironic to me that we are sort of as a society painting men and fathers as irrelevant to families because I've really found that to not be true."

"The work of decolonizing the future is the work of decolonizing our imaginations. We have to tell stories in which the protagonists are those whose stories are least often told, recentering our attention away from the elite, the celebrities, the influencers."

"I think we are very aware now that a ton of people who are in the prison industrial complex actually need mental health support."

"We might be learning slowly, but change is coming fast."

"“What a time to be alive,” adrienne maree brown has written. “Right now we are in a fast river together — every day there are changes that seemed unimaginable until they occurred.” adrienne maree brown and others use many words and phrases to describe what she does, and who she is: A student of complexity. A student of change and of how groups change together. A “scholar of belonging.” A “scholar of magic.”"

"So far, the only thing incremental about climate change is our American response to it."

"The stories we tell can either reflect the society we are a part of or transform it. If we want to bring new worlds into existence, then we need to challenge the narratives that uphold current power dynamics and patterns."

"There has been one constant, as far back as we can understand: The world is always changing."

"I’m reading... Octavia, Ursula. Kiese Laymon. Mary Oliver. James Baldwin. China Mieville."

"My most subversive joy is... that internal knowledge that I am not inferior to a man who is simultaneously thinking that he is superior to me."

"I appreciate the chaos of unplanned time. I find unorganized human time particularly intriguing."

"I don’t avoid the “activist guilt” that’s tied to devoting yourself to justice, but... I certainly examine it. I believe it's tied to the truth that, as an individual, I can never do enough in the face of all the intersecting injustices of my life and time. But I sometimes look at how far I've come, in my lifetime, in my lineage. How much repression I have cast off, how much oppression I have negated, how I went from homophobic to pansexual, from military brat to post-nationalist/post-capitalist. I feel free a lot, I surround myself with good revolutionary people...and I think, ok padawon. This may be an insignificant life in some grand epic scape, but in the scale of my life, I am doing my best and really getting a lot done for a lazy weed lover."

"I had to surrender so many wrong thoughts to begin to see."

"I remind myself I can't be good at something I'm doing for the first time, and that reminder helps me humble into learning mode."

"My pleasure icons are... Marla Stewart of Velvet Lips. Rihanna, obviously. Lizzo too, the pleasure she gets from just confronting the world with her excellence and then laughing."

"We hold so many worlds inside us. So many futures. It is our radical responsibility to share these worlds, to plant them in the soil of our society as seeds for the type of justice we want and need."

"My body has the capacity to sense immense pleasure, and as I get older I keep intentionally expanding my sensual awareness and decolonizing it so that I can sense more pleasure than capitalism believes in."

"True pleasure-joy, happiness and satisfaction-has been the force that helps us move beyond the constant struggle, that helps us live and generate futures beyond this dystopic present, futures worthy of our miraculous lives. Pleasure-embodied, connected pleasure-is one of the ways we know when we are free. That we are always free. That we always have the power to co-create the world."

"Your no makes the way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic. Being able to say no makes yes a choice."

"When I feel like a failure, I look at my plants, at how they wilt and seem to be dying, and then water and sun and my loving words bring them back to vibrancy. I let water move over me, sun change me, love reach me. I root down into the soil and back into my lineage, which reminds me that everything is temporary but nothing disappears, this is how life is. I reach forward and up, shaping a world that feels good for me, for all who look like me, for all who love like me, for all who have yet to realize that love is liberation. I let myself work through anger until all that is left is compassion. I cultivate justice within myself, rooted not in vengeance or righteousness but in love and interdependence. I work hard on answering my calling, listening to the bass notes of my life, following underground rivers to find more room for my whole self. I let my days be spent in love, connection, and creation."

"Science fiction is the perfect "exploring ground," as it gives us the opportunity to play with different outcomes and strategies before we have to deal with the real-world costs."

"I believe that all organizing is science fiction-that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything about how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations. Imaginations that fear Blackness, brownness, fatness, queerness, disability, difference. Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality."

"Find the pleasure path for your life and follow it. Let it reverberate healing back into your ancestors' wounds. Let it open you up and remind you that you are already whole. Let it shape a future where feeling good is the normal, primary experience of all beings."

"I want to lift up the book Mutual Aid by Dean Spade"

"I think ultimately that mutual aid is going to teach us a ton about how to be in communities that can be accountable to each other, because mutual aid only works when you're able to say, "I have a need," [and someone else says] "I have something to offer to that need. Being in conflict is just another need."

"Going through an abusive situation just creates another need. And if we can stretch far, we can say even the person who's caused abuse has some unmet need, and they think it can be met through harm and domination and manipulation and gaslighting. And they think that's going to meet some need in them, but the need is not met. The abuse continues. They just find new people to take it. But mutual aid suggests those needs can be met. Maybe they need a different therapist, maybe they need a different kind of healer or a group of healers, maybe they need to see that people who were structured and shaped to be abusive found another path."

"Each of us is going to have to start to say, in my own life, can I navigate and operate as if no one is disposable?"

"I think that transformative justice is something that happens at an intimate level. It happens in a community that knows each other."

"I look at my community: When is it my turn to mediate? When is it my turn to show up for someone who needs to get out of an abusive dynamic? When is it my turn to show up in community as someone who names that I have caused harm and takes accountability for something that I've done?"

"One of my other teachers, Danielle Sered, said that no one experiences harm for the first time when they're doing harm. As a society, as a species, but specifically in our communities, we have to start asking ourselves those questions like, what caused this? Can we get to the root system?"

"(White supremacy) is a fundamentally mythological state. Human beings are not supreme to each other based on the vagina we came out of. That’s not what determines our worth and our well-being or miraculousness."