African Americans

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"It is true that it has not always been safe for us, but I hope we can come together as a people, create our own safe spaces, and become empowered to reclaim psychedelic healing for ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities."

"There is such a rich tradition of plant medicines in Africa that it is clear Black people have benefited from psychedelic plant medicines for a very long time."

"There were over 500 published studies that came out of ARC from 1935-1975, testing the limits of human tolerance for psychedelics, opiates, and amphetamines on prisoners.' Dr. Isbell's studies included dangerously high and prolonged doses of LSD on his subjects."

"I hope that somewhere in the recesses of our cultural consciousness, there still exists some memory of the valuable psychedelic traditions cultivated by our African ancestors and nature's many gifts that have been lost somewhere between North America and the Middle Passage."

"Many have heard of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis, but few know about the facility dubbed the "Narco Farm.""

"There has been much written about the Indigenous use of plant medicines from Mexico and South America, but psychedelics have been used across cultures and eras. Psychedelics were used in Biblical times to anoint priests and kings, and they have also been used for thousands of years in African cultures. During slavery, Yoruba women from West Africa performed healing roles using their knowledge of plant medicines derived from Africa. During current times in Ethiopia, all plants are believed to possess some degree of medicinal usefulness, and medicinal plants occupy a central place in their traditional healthcare system. Many plants are bred and conserved in sacred community gardens, and families also keep small home gardens. This includes an array of flora for medicinal purposes and important psychoactive plant medicines for psychological and even spiritual problems."

"As an African American clinical psychologist and researcher, it has become evident that we have not been meaningfully included as research participants or researchers in scientific studies, and our voices have not been part of the conversation as these medicines move into mainstream mental health care."

"In southern Africa, there is widespread reliance on ubulawu as psychoactive spiritual medicine used by Indigenous people groups, such as the Xhosa and Zulu, to communicate with their ancestors and treat mental disturbances. Ubulawu, an ancient African plant medicine, is composed of the roots of several potent plants that are ground and made into a cold water infusion, churned to produce a healing foam."

"[About Donald Trump:] Trump ended up governing very differently than he talked and maybe that was obvious to some people that got Trump, but it was not obvious to me who didn't get Trump in 2016. And so I'm certainly much less afraid of a Trump presidency than I was in 2016, because I understand the vast gulf between what he says and what he does. He talks in a stream of consciousness way and entertains ideas far crazier than what he would actually do. And it may be true that because he talks so crazy, I think the immune system of America reacts to him in a way that we react to no other president."

"We're living through a moral panic, one of the great moral panics of American history, about racism and white supremacy."

"[About defunding the police and replacing it with community created police:] A lot of the problems are inherent in the job itself, no matter who you get to be the police."

"Mainstream media outlets selects for people who make points that feel good, that preach to the choir, that don't involve any statistics because people don't what to hear numbers. Ever. They want to hear short soundbites and maybe, at most, a story. And anyone who wants to get more complex than that is going to find [themselves] relegated to non-mainstream."

"People have long defended affirmative action by saying 'It's really just a thumb on the scale. It's used only as a tie-breaker between otherwise identical candidates.' I've always known that that's just a lie or just uninformed by the people who say it. But it does betray a sense that even defenders of the policy are a little bit unconfortable defending the reality of it; they would wish it to be more of a thumb-on-the-scale thing but it's not. And we've had research that's shown that for several decades actually. Thomas Espenshade found it was the equivalent of 450 SAT points for an Asian student relative to a black student, everything else held equal."

"[About Black Lives Matter:] If not for Black Lives Matter, I'm not sure how much we'd be talking about [police reform, qualified immunity, universal body cams, military grade weapons in the police]. All these strike me as good ideas [...] and I think Black Lives Matter deserves credit for [them]. At the same time, the central premise of their movement is not true: The idea that we have a problem with racist cops killing unarmed black people. And it's a dangerous myth because it's the kind of myth that if you believe it, it makes sense to go out and riot and destroy businesses and loot and set things on fire. [...] And that's the narrative we've been sold for the past roughly seven years, let's say, and then the nation started burning. And I don't know who else to blame than the people who spread this myth."

"[In 2018, Donald Trump passed] a bipartisan bill, that includes every progressive criminal justice reform that people on the far left have been calling for since 2007, called the First Step Act. He releases a couple of thousand inmates from federal prison, reduces sentences for a couple of thousand more. The majority of these people are black. It shifts the focus from punishment to rehabilitation. It's just everything that you wouldn't expect a sort of law-and-order politician like Trump to do. And of course he got no credit for it because it was too awkward and surprising to admit that he did something like that. But that was exactly the kind of progress that if it had come after a riot, people would have seen it as proof that riots work. But because it just came out of the blue, in the middle of Trump's first term, people just didn't even pay attention to it. My point here being that progress is happening all the time it's not that it needs riots to happen, it's that all the people that are justifying the riots are not paying attention when the progress is happening."

"I was one of the many people shocked to the point of humor when Black Lives Matter had, as a part of its platform, the end of the nuclear family, criticizing this as a heteronormative, patriarchal system. That you can run an organization meant to solve problems for black America, look out on black America, and say "I know what the problem is: Too much marriage. That's really the problem." That you can even really entertain that thought says something about the lack of logic you're operating with."

"[About black people being over-represented in criminal statistics:] As any intro stat student will tell you, you've got to control for the confounding variables. Men make up more than 90 % of victims in all these cases whether you're talking about brutality, prison, shot by the cops, or otherwise. Men are of course only 50 % of the population. Just viewing that fact doesn't tell you anyting about anti-male bias per se. It's impossible to not to talk about the underlying facts of racially disparate crime: 13 % of the population commits, and suffers, 52 % of the murders. [...] Virtually all of the disparities [...], show [young black men] in particular, showing up at heavily disproportionate rates and that's a first order problem. The police are coming into contact with young black men far more often as a result. [...] I'm not saying there's no racial bias in police; I think there is. [...] But I don't want to be such a self-flattering backseat driver to the cops whose job it is to actually keep everyone safe, including black and hispanic people, the vast majority of whom do not commit crime even in the most criminal neighborhoods. Virtually every study I've looked at that controls for all of these variables finds no anti-black bias in deadly shootings. Sometimes they find anti-black biases in cops' likelyhood to put his hands on and rough up a suspect and that's very real problem, but there's really no disparity to be found when it comes to a cop's decision to pull the trigger."

"The way that I think about wars in general is not just in terms of the actions of the armies, but in terms of what kind of society they're trying to build. [...] I think you can go through every single war in history, be right about who the good guys were, and find war crimes done by the good guys. A hundred percent with no exceptions. If the crux of talking about [the Israel-Gaza conflict] is to get at who is on the right side of the conflict, you're having the wrong conversation. The right conversation is what are the aims of each side, what are they trying to do, what are they trying to build."

"Almost all successful examples of reparations [...] have been to the specific individuals who were harmed, not to their grand-grandchildren. My ancestors were on Thomas Jefferson's plantation; we can prove it; we have the documentation. The question from a policy perspective is, in a condition with limited resources where we are trying to fix the broken public education system, where we have health care costs that are so far gone compared to our peer countries, [...] that we can either allocate limited resources based on who needs it the most, or you can give it to someone like me because my grandparents were on Monticello. The second thing doesn't make sense, and doesn't make sense to most Americans, and it shouldn't make sense."

"There are videos of white people, getting killed by the cops, with their hands up begging for their lives every bit as brutal and terrifying and awful as the videos we've seen. At all the Black Lives Matter protests there's this thing, they always say 'Say their name!' [...] There are so many white names. There are in fact, in absolute terms, there are more white names than there are black names. And I've spent some time looking at them and they're identical. The case is for every black person killed by the police there are usually two or three white people that died exactly the same way. Nobody says their names and nobody cares. That seems to people like the correct moral bias because we're imprinted with the symbolism of the civil rights movement, but we have to outgrow this if we're going to be a cohesive country going into the 21st century which is a very different reality than where we're coming from."

"Many black progressives use the myth of collective, intergenerational transfers of suffering to exempt themselves from the rules of civil discourse."

"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.""

"Progressives ought not dodge the question: Why are blacks the only ethnic group routinely and openly encouraged to nurse stale grievances back to life?"

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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.""

"But don't think that Charlie's wall of lies hemming in the ghetto is impenetrable. People, especially young white people, in America and in Europe are aware of what's happening in the ghetto even if their fathers maintain an obstinate ignorance. All over Europe I've seen young people who've studied the methods of the Black Liberation movement, applying those same methods to the job of forcing a bit of humanity into their profit-crazed and economically teetering countries. Of course it's got its amusing sides too and very often one is forced to rush somewhere for a drink after he's seen a group of the blond German youths with hair frizzled and worn in Afros. The parents of these kids have all picked the portrait of the President of the United States as a symbol of what was good in America...But I've been in no part of Europe where there wasn't the picture of a good American--and it was always Angela Davis!"

"Black Renaissance can come only from Black people, by Black people, of Black people, and for Black people."

"Charlie has not been called a "color crazy summbitch" for nothing. Ask any surviving American Indian about his relationship with the Great White Father and you've got a real Freudian mess on your hands. Ask any Brown Puerto Rican-American or Yellow Nisei-American if he's ever gotten a fair shake from the Great Society and you can get cut. Don't even bother to bug a soul brother with such inanities!"

"there is something about picking up stakes and moving on that never really seems to work out. The restlessness which compels so many humans to go see what's on the other side of the hill, or river, is self-defeating. There are so many hills and so many rivers. And in the end one sits on some cold stone under an improbable tree and sings the blues."

"I never heard of a Black child who wasn't told at some time or other, "Whatever you do don't upset the white folks!" But there was just no place in the home of the brave where a Black kid could reach full growth without upsetting the white folks."