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Quote by Sohla El-Waylly

“So much seafood was once dismissed as the debris of the sea: eels, snared from the Thames River in sixteenth-century England and tucked into pies in lieu of meat; clams, eaten by New England colonists only in times of desperation; oysters, offered all-you-can-eat for 6 cents at bars in nineteenth-century New York City; whelks, pickled and trundled by wheelbarrow through London streets, which in the mid-nineteenth century the British social reformer Henry Mayhew tallied “among the delicacies of the poor” and which housemaids wouldn’t eat in public, lest they be judged unladylike. Even lowlier were lobsters, scorned as indiscriminate bottom feeders, fobbed off on servants and put on prison menus, or else consigned to fertilizer. Their flesh and shells are still used in this way, as their high concentration of nitrogen and calcium helps plants grow.”

Quote by Sohla El-Waylly

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Sohla El-Waylly

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“We're not born equal (Bicycle Diaries, 2766) Astrology is the dumbest superstition of all, your date of birth has zero effect on your destiny, but your place of birth, on the other hand, shapes a great deal of your life and character. Someone born in Paris demands from their parents, that they must go on a world tour again this year, someone born in Palestine asks their parents, can they have a small doll this year. Someone growing up in the blackhole of Calcutta, has to labor 100 times harder to make a name, than someone from Cambridge or Copenhagen. Light bends towards gravity, equality bends towards privilege, some dream of touring the moon, some dream of a roof over head. We're not all born equal, some of us are born with more than two functioning brain cells, but no inherited goldmine, still we chart the cosmos on a bicycle, while monkeys confuse lamborghini with life.”

“I had also learned that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice. Although I came from a home of economic security and relative comfort, I could never get out of my mind the economic insecurity of many of my playmates and the tragic poverty of those living around me. During my late teens I worked two summers, against my father’s wishes—he never wanted my brother and me to work around white people because of the oppressive conditions—in a plant that hired both Negroes and whites. Here I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro. Through these early experiences I grew up deeply conscious of the varieties of injustice in our society.”

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“Those of us who refuse to concede that global capitalism represents the planet's best future, and that Africa and the former third world are destined to remain forever ensconced in the poverty of underdevelopment, are confronted with this crucial question: how can we encourage radical critiques of capitalism as integral to struggles against racism as we also advance the recognition that we cannot envision the dismantling of capitalism as long as the structures of racism remain intact?”