QUOTES
We
have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.
I
think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you
to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have
achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.
Progressive
art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in
the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character
of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.
I
decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to
be involved actively.
Jails
and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into
specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.
The
work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the
requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire
that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.
Media
mystifications should not obfuscate a simple, perceivable fact; Black teenage
girls do not create poverty by having babies. Quite the contrary, they have babies
at such a young age precisely because they are poor -- because they do not have
the opportunity to acquire an education, because meaningful, well-paying jobs
and creative forms of recreation are not accessible to them... because safe, effective
forms of contraception are not available to them.
To
understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between
the men and the women.
“We
have been basically persuaded that we should not talk about racism.”
Racism
is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same
time it's perhaps far more terrible than it's ever been.
I
think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certain measure
of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage
of the opportunities.
Well
of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't
have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.
Well,
we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault
on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.
What
I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black
middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished
than ever before.
You
can never stop and as older people, we have to learn how to take leadership from
the youth and I guess I would say that this is what I'm attempting to do right
now.
"Imprisonment
has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems."
It is
important not only to have the awareness and to feel impelled to become involved,
it's important that there be a forum out there to which one can relate, an organization,
a movement.
