michelleweber

“Political struggle can leap five years in five days, such is its nature. What lies around the corner of tomorrow is unknowable; what is knowable are our solidarities and strategies.” To understand and contextualize today’s protests, you gotta know your history.

“You wondered out loud what writing “multiculturally” actually meant and what kind of black man would write the word “bro” in an email.”

“He would be called a murderer and a domestic terrorist. But to us, he was family. Our struggles with systemic racism were the same.”

“Racism watered this country from its very seedlings, and it has had a long time to grow unimpeded. Ending its influence, both on our very person and on public policy, is a demolition job.”

“I thought about what it meant to have a stranger’s saliva on my skin. Did it sink into my pores, or slide its way into my mouth? The possibility that their violence would linger on me, in me, forever, was untenable.”

“Either there is something superior or inferior about the races, something dangerous and deathly about black people, and black people are the American nightmare; or there is something wrong with society, something dangerous and deathly about racist policy, and black people are experiencing the American nightmare.” One is a racist myth; the other, antiracist truth.

“I just don’t think Americans fully realize how terrorizing it is to black males when we are falsely suspected as violent criminals.”

Cop shows humanize cops. They align us with the police. They desensitize us to police violence. It’s time to turn that CSI marathon off.

He raped and tortured her for years. He had a gun; he “showed her diagrams of the human brain… the place that would allow her to live but without speech or memory. ‘Wouldn’t that be convenient, he said.’” She shot him, to save herself and her kids. And according to the prosecutor, jury, and judge, […]

“I think every life is like a novel.” Marga Griesbach was born in Germany in 1927. Her life is like multiple novels — horror, romance, magical realism, travelogue. Whatever you’re doing right now, you should stop it and read this story.