“Everyone is familiar with the slogan ‘The personal is political’ — not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We oftentimes do the work of the state in and through our interior lives.”
“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”
“Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world’s wealthiest people. The shortage is due not to how much material wealth there actually is, but to the way in which it is exchanged or circulated. The market system artificially creates scarcity by blocking the flow between the source and the consumer. Grain may rot in the warehouse while hungry people starve because they cannot pay for it. The result is famine for some, and diseases of excess for others. The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more than human beings.”
“Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them — inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men. But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming ‘the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Differences in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible — this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.”
“The idea that some of us can simply opt out of politics — the idea that politics is something one chooses…rather than something we have whether we choose it or not…is a fantasy of epic proportions. This kind of nonpolitical storytelling — and the stunted readership it demands — asks us to uphold the lie that certain bodies, certain characters, certain stories, remain depoliticized, neutral, and universal.”
“The very term profit cries out for redefinition, for the stock market defines as profitable every kind of destruction and lacks terms for valuing cultures, diversities, or long-term well-being, let alone happiness, beauty, freedom, or justice.”
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
“What good is knowing unless it is coupled with caring? Science can give us knowing, but caring comes from some place else… While science could be a source of and a repository for knowledge, the scientific world view is all too often an enemy of ecological compassion. It is important in thinking about this lens to separate two ideas that are too often synonymous in the mind of the public: the practice of science and the scientific worldview that it feeds. Science is the process of revealing the world through rational inquiry. The practice of doing real science brings the questioner into an unparalleled intimacy with nature, fraught with wonder and creativity as we try to comprehend the mysteries of the more than human world…Contrasting with this is the scientific worldview…that uses science and technology to reinforce reductionist, materialist economic and political agendas. I maintain that the destructive lens… is not science itself but [this]… The illusion of dominance and control. The separation of knowledge from responsibility.”