“Suits, ties, and demure dresses didn't protect our ancestors from violence before or during the civil rights movement, and they won't protect residents of the inner city now, no matter how often people try to blame victims of racism for how they are dressed.”
Source: Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
“Fish?
The little fish eats the tiny fish,
The big fish eats the little fish--
So only the biggest fish get fat.
Do you know any folks like that?”
Source: Where the Sidewalk Ends
“To learn how people describe their understanding of their lives is very
illuminating, for ‘ideas are the conscious expression – real or illusory – of (our) actual relations and activities’, because ‘social existence determines consciousness’ [Marx]. Given that our existence is shaped by the capitalist mode of production, experience, to be fully understood in its broader social and political implications, has to be situated in the context of the capitalist forces and relations that produce it. Experience in itself, however, is suspect because, dialectically, it is a unity of opposites; it is unique, personal, insightful and revealing, and, at the same time, thoroughly social, partial, mystifying, itself the product of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing about. Given the emancipatory goals of the RGC [race-gender-class] perspective, it is through the analytical tools of Marxist theory that it can move forward, beyond the impasse revealed by the constant reiteration of variations on the ‘interlocking’ metaphor.”
Source: Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays
“Black Americans at the top of the scale, with incomes of more than $100,000 a year, were most likely to cling to the more traditional view that “blacks can still be thought of as a single race because they have so much in common.” Perhaps we should begin to think of racial solidarity as a luxury item.”
Source: Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America
“In the little patch of concrete by the front porch were the two pennies stuck in there when Leroy and I started first grade. “Long as we got those two cents,” Carrie would say, “we ain’t broke.”
Source: Rubyfruit Jungle
“A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work.”
Source: Walden or, Life in the Woods
“Every human society must justify its inequalities: unless reasons for them are found, the whole political and social edifice stands in danger of collapse.”
Source: Capital and Ideology
“The key theoretical and political question is not, therefore, how class (in the Marxist sense) ‘intersects’ with the various identities where individuals are presumably located, but how to differentiate between the effects of capitalist class power upon large and heterogeneous (in terms of identity) sectors of the working class, and the effects of identity-based interactions and conflicts within those sectors.”
Source: Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays
“...today class has been reduced to another ‘ism’; i.e. to another form oppression which, together with gender and race, integrate a sort of mantra, something that everyone ought to include in theorising and research, though, to my knowledge, theorising about it remains at the level of metaphors (e.g. interweaving, interaction, interconnection, etc.)”
Source: Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays
“Life is just a slide. Back and forth between loving and leaving, remembering and forgetting, holding on and letting go.”