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Dispossession Quotes

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Dispossession Quotes

“For reasons that have less to do with an abstraction like white supremacy than with the dynamics of a political and economic regime that concentrates benefits at the top at the expense of everyone else, black New Orleanians are disproportionately–but by no means exclusively–likely to occupy the ranks of the dispossessed under that regime. And the terms on which the white supremacist past has been acknowledged and repudiated actually obscure the sources of inequality and dispossession today. While the segregationist system was clearly and obviously racist and white supremacist, it wasn't merely about white supremacy for its own sake alone. It was the instrument of a specific order of political and economic power that was clearly racial but that most fundamentally stabilized and reinforced the dominance of powerful political and economic interests. White supremacy was and remains an ideology, and a very abstract one at that, and because it's so abstract–its basic premises and categories are fantasies–its practical warrants are always improvised.”

Racism Inequality White Supremacy Segregation Dispossession Economic Elites

Book:The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

Source: The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata. Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster—spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten. Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.”

Source: Sinew of the Social Species

“If I must die, you must live to tell my story to sell my things to buy a piece of cloth and some strings, (make it white with a long tail) so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a blaze— and bid no one farewell not even to his flesh not even to himself— sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love If I must die let it bring hope let it be a tale”

Poet Tragedy Martyr Settler Colonialism Annexation Dispossession If I Must Die

Author:Refaat Alareer

“Any so-called 'radical' strategy that seeks to empower the disempowered in the realm of social reproduction by opening up that realm to monetisation and market forces is headed in exactly the wrong direction. Providing financial literacy classes for the populace at large will simply expose that population predatory practices as they seek to manage their own investment portfolios like minnows swimming in a sea of sharks. Providing microcredit and microfinance facilities encourages people to participate in the market economy but does so in such a way as to maximise the energy they have to expend while minimising their returns. Providing legal title for land property ownership in the hope that this will bring economic and social stability to the lives of the marginalised will almost certainly lead in the long run to their dispossession and eviction from that space and place they already hold through customary use rights.”

Property Rights Monetization Dispossession

Book:Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

Source: Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

“Even in the early phases of tenant reduction, during the seventeenth century, many of the dispossessed appear to have maintained a foothold in the local area, often by turning to spinning and other activity associated with sheep farming - a more formal division of production and gendering of the working population. However, by the 1710s, the decade when the Buccleuchs began efforts to rationalise their 'South Country' operations, as many as two thirds of the Ettrick and Yarrow valley farms were under a single tenancy. By the 1790s, it was nine in ten. It is across this period that widespread dispossession seems to have turned into widespread clearance across the Southern Uplands in general, and Ettrick and Yarrow in particular. Tenants compelled to flit at the end of a tack would take with them wives, children, elderly relatives and unrelated servants, each removal amounting to a substantial dent to the population.”

Clearance Eighteenth Century Dispossession Ettrick Forest Scotts Of Buccleuch Sheep Farming Southern Uplands

Book:Scottish Literary Review, Autumn/Winter 2025

Source: Scottish Literary Review, Autumn/Winter 2025