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Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream QUOTES

Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream QUOTES

1 " Individual safety and prosperity at the expense of solidarity can only ever replicate capitalist hierarchies and the violent means imposing them. If you view your emancipation as separate from mine, we will forever be locked in an unwinnable competition. "

― Mychal Denzel Smith, , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

2 " There are those of us who can retreat to a fantastical America, and those of us who are always here—stuck. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

3 " The most insidious and remarkable quality of American mythmaking is the ability to swallow up the lives of those who stood in open rebellion to the American project and turn them into obedient symbols of American exceptionalism. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

4 " He failed to appeal to the American ego, to be a cheerleader for American exceptionalism. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

5 " The problem is when progress becomes its own ideology—that is, when advocacy for incrementalism is seen as the astute and preferred mode of political transformation. It is never easy to win, but progress is also never sufficient. Incremental change keeps the grinding forces of oppression—death—in place. Actively advocating for this position is a moral failure. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

6 " Donald Trump so undermines the idea of the president as agnostic leader that George W. Bush has come back around as a shining example of it. The scandals of the Trump White House move with such rapidity that nostalgia has set in for when they appeared only every few months. Trump has been so openly bigoted toward Muslims that Bush quotes about respecting Islam—absented the context of his all-out assault on majority Muslim countries—garner retroactive praise. Trump lies so much in service of himself that Bush’s lies in service of empire are noble by comparison. You can indulge this delusion if you don’t live in Iraq or New Orleans. Or if you didn’t lose your home because of predatory lending and treacherous Wall Street gambling. Then Bush can be your cuddly grandpa. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

7 " Douglass was addressing the white moderate, ever concerned with order, insisting that the struggle to abolish slavery would require more than an appeal to moral correctness. There would come a need for confrontation, an unsettling of the peace, or else the silence would lead only to the preservation of the institution. Douglass’s words were meant to urge action in the face of oppression. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

8 " the mandates of progressive policing are exactly the same as those of authoritarian policing, which is to say that policing is policing no matter the adjective you put in front of it. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

9 " We are asked to hold the people in uniform in high regard because they keep us safe, but never asked whether or not we actually feel safe or what we would need in order to feel safe. “Police are not public, nor good,” writes movement lawyer Derecka Purnell in Boston Review, if we genuinely consider the definition of “public” as encompassing all of us, which history shows we do not. The police are the enemies of black people, Latinx people, trans people, and poor people. Is it our duty to revere them, even as their presence conflicts with our freedom? After Ferguson? After Baltimore? "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

10 " It is only logical, from the standpoint of the empire, to swallow up anything that may threaten its existence. Dissent is inevitable but need not be destructive. By co-opting the heroes of insurgence, the empire is able to bolster its constructed moral authority. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

11 " the past, I have been accused of hating the police. And I do. Such an admission may be taken to mean that I hate each police officer as an individual whom I have judged unfairly on the basis of their occupation. But I hate the police the same as I hate any institution that exists as an obstruction to justice. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

12 " justice is a proactive commitment to providing each person with the material and social conditions in which they can both survive and thrive as a healthy and self-actualized human being. This is not an easy thing to establish, as it requires all of us buying into the idea that we must take responsibility for one another. But it is the only form of a just world. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

13 " Dr. King’s treatment as an “infallible oracle” is not laziness; his perceived infallibility is related to the message he has been chosen to deliver. Reduced to an apolitical dreamer, he can be a tool to divert energy away from forming structural solutions to inequality and injustice while spreading grade-school-level bromides in favor of kindness. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

14 " What I have come to accept is that being a victim of Americanism and a product of it are not mutually exclusive. It is the inescapable course for those of us who are not white, male, cis, hetero, and wealthy. Even as we suffer under the boot of oppression, we are not immune to indoctrination into the American myth. We are brought up in the very institutions that are responsible for perpetuating the lie of meritocracy, and it begins to sound plausible. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

15 " Nor are they synonymous, which is what the kneeling protests, at their most potent, reminded us. Whether or not they were “American” in nature is inconsequential if we, as Americans, have failed to provide that term with meaning beyond the delusions we pass off as national treasures. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

16 " Reduced to an apolitical dreamer, he can be a tool to divert energy away from forming structural solutions to inequality and injustice while spreading grade-school-level bromides in favor of kindness. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

17 " The white supremacist political party chose a white supremacist to represent it in the presidential election. An institution created for the protection of white supremacy installed that white supremacist into the nation’s highest office. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

18 " there is violence here, just as there is violence any place where the people are stripped of the means to build a meaningful life. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

19 " academics, media professionals, policymakers, presidents—excuse the presence of the police here, and in other hoods like this one, because it is their position that in order to stop the violence of the hood you must impose the violence of the state. The police are meant, from this view, to protect the people from themselves, to enforce the discipline their culture lacks. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

20 " This is all bullshit, and once anyone encounters a police officer doing their actual job, they know it is bullshit. Police patrol and harass. They reluctantly answer questions better suited for town visitor centers. They enforce traffic laws at their discretion, or to shore up municipal budgets through the imposition of exorbitant fines. They introduce the potential for violence in response to calls about loud music. They arrest people who have disobeyed them and then make up the charges later. They dismiss the stories of rape victims; they side with domestic abusers. They commit rape and domestic abuse at higher rates than the rest of the population. They quell rebellions. They arrest freedom fighters. They shoot and kill with impunity. "

― , Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream