jamila osman:

“in 2007, in a post-9/11 political and psychological landscape, president bush and donald rumsfeld, then secretary of defense, launched u.s. africa command (africom), which oversees all department of defense military operations on the continent in order[…]” “to ‘monitor and disrupt violent extremist organizations and protect u.s. interests’ because of the continent’s growing strategic importance. initially based in stuttgart, germany, africom was formed without the input or support of any african leaders, many of whom decried its”

robyn maynard:

“we have just lived through—are still living through—a moment in which one catastrophe enfolded into another. because, of course, the crisis that is this pandemic is by no means separate from the ecological crisis.” “it’s not that we weren’t warned: as so many scientists have noted, a shifting climate made another pandemic nearly inevitable. a 2010 study in global warming described how climate change facilitates the conditions for a new and possibly deadly pandemic: how the thawing ice[…]”

charisse burden-stelly and jodi dean:

“for several decades in the early to mid-twentieth-century united states, black communist women organized, fought, and led mass campaigns against national oppression and economic exploitation.” “within and adjacent to the cpusa, they highlighted the conditions facing black women workers, placed the abolition of white supremacy at the center of the class struggle, and viewed the achievement of socialism as necessary for full social and economic equality.”

walter rodney:

“in many respects, when we ask the question today about the relevance of marxism to black people, we have already reached a minority position, as it were. many of those engaged in the debate present the debate as though marxism is a european phenomenon[…]” “and black people responding to it must of necessity be alienated because the alienation of race must enter into the discussion. they seem not to take into account that already that methodology & that ideology have been utilized, internalized, domesticated in large parts of[…]”

ruth wilson gilmore:

“the rise of the cage as a large-scale, all-purpose solution to problems is a relatively recent phenomenon in world history. modern prisons were born and grew up with the united states, as impersonal but individualized sites of large-scale social control” “in the long historical turn marked by the consolidation of the bourgeois nation-state as the world’s fundamental political-economic unit, the normalization of capitalism, and the development of racist science and philosophy to explain it all. although the reformist purpose of”

hakim adi:

“what is evident is that by the eve of the first world war a pan-african network incorporating new and older figures existed and spanned three continents. there were also clear attempts to organize across africa and the diaspora and to develop publications that could” “speak to the problems facing millions of africans around the world: colonial rule, various forms of economic, social and political oppression and the ubiquitous anti-african racism. in the united states, for instance, over 1,100 african american men, women and children were[…]”

george jackson:

“lenin, guevara and fanon, all in their particular fashion, postulate that before revolution can take place, all other forms of redress must be exhausted, clearly exhausted. electoral processes must have broken down[…]” “the confidence of the electorate in any of the old forms completely shattered, confidence in the ability of the old system to honestly organize any aspect of public life must be shaken to the core.”

safiya bukhari:

“the error everyone—black panther party supporters and detractors alike—seems to make is to look at the party in a vacuum, separating it from its time and roots. the party came out of the black community and its experiences.” “in order to understand the issue of sexism in the party, it is necessary to review the historical experience of black people in this country as well as the climate in which the party came into being.”

james baldwin:

“the will of the people, or the state, is revealed by the state’s institutions. there was not, then, nor is there, now, a single american institution which is not a racist institution. and racist institutions—the unions, for one example, the church, for another” “and the army—or the military—for yet another, are meant to keep the n*gger in his place. yes: we have lived through avalanches of tokens and concessions but white power remains white. and what it appears to surrender with one hand it obsessively clutches in the other.”

imani perry:

“so i begin with the proposition that the economic liberalism of which [john] locke was a foundational thinker—and, specifically, the doctrine of personhood—entails a system whereby the subject before the state or the law was made into either a patriarch[…]” “his liege (woman), or someone outside legal recognition, whether slaves or what in that time were termed ‘savages’ but whom we can also term ‘nonpersons’ in the juridical sense. the position of the nonperson is a fundamental supplementation of the idea of gender as produced[…]”

butch lee:

“it’s too easy to understand colonialism only on one level and not to understand neo-colonialism at all. just as we have only a stereotyped idea of what class is. here ‘marxists’ are usually among the worst offenders.” “you know, the stereotyped fantasy of heroic factory workers making revolution against the rockefellers. well, that won’t cut it. not against neo-colonialism, which is a much more sophisticated system of oppression.”

alvin poussaint

“i’m a psychiatrist, which means that i was trained, basically, in freudian-type psychoanalytical methods with some variations on a theme, which is basically a european, western, white science.” “you have to remember that freud got most of his theories from analyzing upper-class white women in europe and that, from this, he developed a whole type of psychoanalytic theory. so, there’s some question of how relevant this type of thinking might be to black people[…]”

achille mbembe:

“in fact, everything leads back to borders—these dead spaces of nonconnection which deny the very idea of a shared humanity, of a planet, the only one we have, that we share together, and to which we are linked by the ephemerality of our common condition.” “but perhaps, to be completely exact, we should speak not of borders but instead of ‘borderization.’ what, then, is this ‘borderization,’ if not the process by which world powers permanently transform certain spaces into impassable places for certain classes of populations?”

“black power’ as a movement has been most clearly defined in the usa. slavery in the us helped create the capital for the development of the us as the foremost capitalist power, and the blacks have subsequently been the most exploited sector of labour.” “many blacks live in that supposedly great society at a level of existence comparable to blacks in the poorest section of the colonial world. the blacks in the us have no power. they have achieved prominence in a number of ways – they can sing, run, box, play baseball, etc.”

frantz fanon:

“during decolonization, certain colonized intellectuals have established a dialogue with the bourgeoisie of the colonizing country. during this period the indigenous population is seen as a blurred mass.” “the few ‘native’ personalities whom the colonialist bourgeois have chanced to encounter have had insufficient impact to alter their current perception and nuance their thinking.”

“zoning laws and racial covenants become the expression of settler colonialism to determine the use and value of land based on racial histories.”

—soyica diggs colbert “zoning laws helped to install the conceptual framework of settler colonialism via segregation. as with the history of settler colonialism, vigilante justice supplemented the law.”

joshua chambers-letson:

“freedom, within white supremacist liberal capitalist modernity, is largely understood to be a possession or right: the freedom to own, to enter the market, or to buy and sell one’s labor.” “as lisa lowe argues, ‘liberal ideas of political emancipation, ethical individualism, historical progress, and free market economy were employed in the expansion of empire [and these] universalizing concepts of reason, civilization, and freedom effect[ed]…”

du bois: “thus slavery was the economic lag of the 16th century carried over into the 19th century & bringing by contrast & by friction moral lapses and political difficulties. it has been estimated that the southern states had in 1860 three billion dollars invested in slaves…” “which meant that slaves and land represented the mass of their capital. being generally convinced that negroes could only labor as slaves, it was easy for them to become further persuaded that slaves were better off than white workers[…]”

edward said:

“the question of palestine’ has irritated and penetrated the general awareness in a new and possibly propitious way, although palestinian self-determination was first voted on affirmatively at the united nations in 1969.” “(general assembly resolution 2535b expressed grave concern ‘that the denial of [palestinian] rights has been aggravated by the reported acts of collective punishment, arbitrary detention, curfews, destruction of houses and property, deportation and other repressive acts...”

amos wilson, on white projection:

"through projection, the white american community transfers or exports its external contradictions - the conflicts, self-incrimination and tensions they engender - from itself to the african american community." "by this means it rids itself of certain discomforts and discontents by forcing them on the black community and perceiving them as originating in that community. by so doing it can better deny those characteristics in itself."

dr. w. e. b. du bois, on how poor whites were instructive in the maintenance of the institution of slavery: “the system of slavery demanded a special police force and such a force was made possible and unusually effective by the presence of the poor whites. this explains the difference between the slave revolts in the west indies, and the lack of effective revolt in the southern US.”