Quotes About Injustice

The mind-numbing, soul-killing savage sameness that makes each day an echo of the day before, with neither thought nor hope of growth, makes prison the abode of Spirit death that it is for over a million men and women now held in U.S. hell holes.

If you want to get your outcasts out of sight, first you need a ghetto and then you need a prison to take pressure off the ghetto. . . . Short-term terror and revulsion are more powerful than long-term wisdom or self-interest.

As UCLA historian Sarah Haley notes, in earlier periods when the numbers of the confined were "only" in the tens of thousands, the prisons still concentrated, "massified," the lives of targeted groups, particularly African Americans in post-slavery U.S.A.

Children walking out on strike from textile mills in New Jersey in the 1840s, shoemakers doing the same in New England, the Black Panthers and other dissidents of color challenging white supremacist exploitation in the 1960s and 1970s—for all their differences, these share in being viewed and treated as "social dynamite.

As French novelist and essayist Jean Genet once wrote about prison, "it is in this place that racism reaches its cruelest pitch . . . in this place that racism becomes a kind of concentrate of racism.

Structural racism works—if I could summarize all too briefly—by stereotyping peoples and then routinizing socially experienced outcomes that are violent and destructive, often exposing members of racially-marked groups to slow or sudden death.

I cite here, again, Gilmore's definition: "Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

To live protected within any version of a gated community diminishes me; it is an affront to my dignity as a person. It is to live as a parasite, and so clothes my everyday living in structural violence.

I include as "economically elite" not just the fraction of the one-percent who control the nation's financial portfolio, as it were, those who have the largest incomes and economic power. I include within the culture of the economic elite those other groups who live dependent upon, or in proximity to, this largely white overclass.

The suffering of the conquered and colonized people appears as a necessary sacrifice and the inevitable process of modernization. This logic has been applied from the conquest of America until the Gulf War, and its victims are as diverse as indigenous Americans and Iraqi Civilians. Enriqué Dussel, The Invention of the Americas

Secondly, what is overlooked by the rhetoric of "mostly blacks and Hispanics" are those prisoners who are Arab-American, A/AAPI, or American Indian. Even

The problems I write of in this section do not focus on only violent practices inside correctional facilities, detention centers, or federal, state, and local prisons and jails. Just as importantly, these internal dynamics are significant because they express and reinforce sexual inequality and gender injustice in the larger society.

In these ways, the racial distribution of groups in the prison population becomes a dramatic stage on which the rest of society works out, in various modes, its calculus of white supremacy. The racism within the prisons provides a platform by which the larger society continually sharpens up its racial calculus.

The prisons of today preserve and display the way the black-white antithesis has been deployed in white supremacist logic and persists as a dominant structure. That is to say, in today's prisons an "anti-black white racism" constitutes a white supremacist order of power deployed against all non-white groups. In

The police are often the frontline for surveillance, control, and dissemination of terror in poor communities.

People today are lifting up their cries and forging new actions from an oppressive regime in our day. At

Further, there are structures of domination, again with histories and social patterns that limit many while entitling others in unfair ways (white supremacism, gender and sexual injustice, class exploitation, nationalisms, et al.). As

When we eat wheat from Canada," remarked Hitler one evening during the war, "we don't think about the despoiled Indians.

The danger of rejecting America's founding principles is illustrated best in this instance by Wilson himself. As is well documented, Wilson was an open racist who, among other things, as president resegregated the federal bureaucracy.32

Gandhi was not talking about defeating or overthrowing anyone. Satyagraha—Gandhi's nonviolent action—was not a way for one group to seize what it wanted from another. It was not a weapon of class struggle, or of any other kind of division. Satyagraha was instead an instrument of unity. It was a way to remove injustice and restore social harmony, to the benefit of both sides.

Satyagraha—Gandhi's nonviolent action—was not a way for one group to seize what it wanted from another. It was not a weapon of class struggle, or of any other kind of division. Satyagraha was instead an instrument of unity. It was a way to remove injustice and restore social harmony, to the benefit of both sides.

This is how planet Earth earned its shameful reputation of undervaluing people by ethnicity, religion, gender, and whatnot. At some point man's impression was labeled the voice of God. But man's impression always contained the blind flaw of humanness.

women chained in place with bike locks, leading their arresting officers in a round of "Amazing Grace." "This is the manufactured division that keeps us separated," Ethan told me. "And separation is the source of how we're in this position." What if he could re-create the joy and song and theater of the protesters but without a demonstration?

They want us down to nothing, Emil, people with no pasts!" Emil held his wife as she trembled and shook, feeling as helpless as she did.