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Quote by Ijeoma Oluo

“Act now, because people are dying now in this unjust system. How many lives have been ground up by racial prejudice and hate? How many opportunities have we already lost? Act and talk and learn and fuck up and learn some more and act again and do better. We have to do this all at once. We have to learn and fight at the same time. Because people have been waiting far too long for their chance to live as equals in this society.”

Quote by Ijeoma Oluo

Book:So You Want to Talk About Race
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So You Want to Talk About Race

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Ijeoma Oluo

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“The needs of the black community for adequate jobs, housing, and education can be met only by developing a political strategy that will attract a majority of Americans to a program for social change. There are whites who are unemployed and white workers whose real income is steadily decreasing as the cost of living rises. Both these groups share with blacks the desire for increased and upgraded employment opportunities. Let us build a movement with them. there are whites living in substandard housing and paying exorbitant rents. Their children attend schools that are overcrowded and understaffed. They share with blacks the desire for massively funded programs of housing and education. Let us build a movement with them also. And there are those more affluent whites of liberal persuasion who sincerely desire social justice. They too should be our allies. These are positive points around which a political majority can be built. Such a strategy is the only means by which black people will achieve social and economic equality within the context of contemporary American society.”

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Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“If only I could cry. I am beyond that. The light, the light, lending itself to empty downtown Saturday, but still the stupid insensate cars flush by oblivious to their stupidity, my silent plea. It isn't Mexico. It's not Paris. It's a painting by Hopper come to life. I am trapped inside a dead thing. Language is impossible here, even in English. Who has the arrogance to say: I'm mad, this is my crazy view of things, help me. I'm trapped in a silent world, a tableau of forty years ago. The walls are different, the tables, the heights of the veiling and the chairs. I loom above this letter. The view past the rows of cakes in the plate glass window is unfamiliar. I am a ghost. There is nothing now between me and death. Death is the unfamiliarity of everything, the strangeness of the once familiar. The same spatial configurations only the light is hollow, sick. I think I lack the energy to hit expensive discos which I don't know where they are to be rejected tonight. I look passable. My energy's low. I love to dance but despair is not a good muse. This Mexico, babe. Men who don't love you but act wildly as if they do initially. Self-involved, narcissistic men... The men drink and philosophize about pain. The women live it solo and culturelessly. No one cries, except easily, sentimentally. The devil, therefore God, exists. Oaxaca was a pushover compared to this. Pain had boundaries there. Spare us big cities, oh lord!”

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“[Sin ese libro], tú no podrías escuchar nada sobre nuestra tradición de resistencia femenina a la opresión, que se remonta a la mujer nativa que tomó los techos de las casas en lo que luego se convertiría en México e "hizo llover dardos y piedras" sobre los invasores españoles. O a la mujer que, en Oaxaca, demandó a su esposo por abuso y logró que su caso llegara a la corte en 1630. O a las mujeres Maya que encerró al cura español en su iglesia por no aceptar que se enterraran a las víctimas mayas de una epidemia de tifus en tierras de la iglesia. O a las masivas "Revueltas del Maíz" de 1962 realizadas por mujeres que se rehusaban a morir de hambre. [Without a book like this] you would not hear about our tradition of female resistance to oppression, going back to Aztec women who took to the rooftops in what later became Mexico City and ‘rained down darts and stones’ on the invading Spainiards. Or the woman who filed suit in Oaxaca against her husband for abuse and had her case heard in court-in 1630! Or the Maya women who lackeed up the local Spanish priest in his church for not having Maya victims of a typhus epidemic buried in church ground. And the massive ‘Corn Riots’ of 1692 by women who refused to starve.”

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