Anti-racist, feminist justice requires creating socially shared affective receptivity, not merely ideological nor cognitive openness.
The fantasy of “economic self-reliance” is predicated on privileging white, properties interests and restricting public resources for their own use
Ethical witnessing seeks to make justice irresistible and white supremacy intolerable.
Racism is perpetually insecure and anxious, despite economic, racial, national and gender dominance.
Depoliticization of racial struggles meant protest against exclusion and exploitation were reformatted as acts of crime against the nation.
Neoliberalism would have us individualize problems rather than make fundamental changes.
Justice is not a static thing we achieve once and for all. It is something that has to be persistently struggled for on the basis of shared principles as conditions change.
But we are comforted and motivated by the fact that at the very least, we try to abide by our principles. We do this imperfectly and always incompletely. When we try not to engage in the labor of hatred, denial, disavowal, guilt, and projection, when we reveal lies repeated by white heteropatriarchal supremacy, when we do not reject the fact that we are all complicit in systems of denigration and destruction in some way, when we do not shy away from our social and political responsibility to end oppression – that is when the process of struggling for justice begins to offer an unchartered sense of liberation, an unlegislated experience of freedom, and a mutually interdependent place to belong.
Thinking from my dear sister/friend, Dr. Paula Ioanide