Potent quotables
“Weathering” is a concept first coined in 1992 by public health researcher Arline Geronimus. With the term, Geronimus draws attention to the ways in which people absorb stressors and oppressors in the broader environment, and how this causes preventable illness and premature death.
That many of us have a hard time imagining a world with universal healthcare or a world without prisons is a clear sign that even our dreams are weathered.
Despite how inequality is made to seem natural, scarcity is manufactured. We no doubt have the means to guarantee that everyone has jobs, healthcare, education, housing, and the ability to ensure millions of children do not go hungry. But we must demand a permanent divestment from policing, prisons, and the entire carceral apparatus, and a radical reinvestment in public goods that reflect our interdependence as people.
Spade points to three types of movement work: dismantling harmful systems, providing for people’s immediate needs, and creating alternative structures that can meet those needs based on values of care, democratic participation, and solidarity.
Viral justice orients us differently toward small-scale, often localized, actions. It invites us to witness how an idea or action that sprouts in one place may be adopted, adapted, and diffused elsewhere. But it also counters the assumption that “scaling up” should always be the goal.
As just one person, let’s band together with all the other just people who are equally hungry for change.
Many people want a full-fledged alternative to materialize before they’re willing to act. But it’s in our daily actions and shifts in thinking that new worlds are first conceived.
Ultimately, we change the world by changing it. Remember that the first time someone hung up a For Whites Only sign outside a storefront, that represented change. The first time someone placed an electronic monitor around a person’s ankle, that represented change. The first time a bank drew up a redlining map to restrict home loans to Black homebuyers, that represented change.
Too often, the point of studying health disparities seems to be to conduct another study that begets more funding to carry out another study, rather than to do what we can in the here and now to eliminate the sources of harm… We should ask ourselves whether research is serving as a stall tactic so we never collectively act on what we already know when it comes to engendering health and well-being.
This is perhaps the most sickening part of white supremacy, that to survive, we must inhabit it, know its logics, adopt its vision, if only to evade it.
And over the years, those initial observations bore out—here was a school leader who did not ration respect, one who was deeply committed to making everyone feel welcome, and he did this less with grand gestures and more in the genuine regard he showed to each person he encountered.
What, then, is the opposite of social abandonment? Not grand announcements, posturing, and virtue signaling, but caring complicity even when there’s no audience to bear witness.
It turns out, transforming the weather doesn’t require magical powers. It just requires that we begin to plot—emboldening one another, strengthening our relationships, watering the alternatives we want to grow, and shouting love in all we do.
to the infamous ongoing abuses of police power cloaked in the popular rhetoric of professional heroism and sacrifice, I wonder whether future generations will look back at us, astonished at how we could justify such a wretched and wasteful system.
Each time the carceral system brands a loved one, an entire family is marked. We feel the iron of a vicious system whose appetite seems limitless. When the beast decided it had had enough, it spit my brother back out. Record expunged. But not before forcing him to sit for years in its repulsive belly, corroding his spirit and consuming his mind. The stench of that beast snakes around us, tightening and releasing, squeezing and pulsing in what clinicians term posttraumatic stress, anxiety, and depression.
Do we really want equal opportunity profiling by the police, or do we want to abolish policing and all the harm it causes? Should we be trying to make it so all lives serve equally as targets? Or no lives?
Crime data doesn’t include the violent crimes committed by police or jail guards—several million physical and sexual assaults occur each year, according to Karakatsanis.
According to Gilmore, activists who engage in “social mothering” in this way present us with a “glimpse of utopia’s work” by mobilizing across the many boundaries created by oppressive carceral geographies: “They come forward, in the first instance, because they will not let their children go.
Since the creation of 911, “police officers have become the weaponized embodiment of social and racial bias, dispatched at the behest of semi-anonymous callers who (knowingly or not) may release devastating police violence.” According to a 2020 study by the Vera Institute of Justice, most of the 240 million annual calls to 911 relate to nonemergencies like noise complaints, parking issues, and complaints about unhoused people. The universal emergency number is easy and convenient, yes, but we should critically assess it to see how it started and whom it ultimately benefits.
After years of believing it was possible to tame the police, to make them less hunter, more helper, I now know that the solution is not better training. Instead, we must come to grips with the facts. The police cannot provide solutions to the long list of issues they are tasked with managing: economic precarity, mental health crises, homelessness, substance abuse, and more.
Abolitionist organizing, after all, is not simply about getting rid of the police, but about imagining and investing in a “million experiments” with care and accountability: a Community Activation Bus that serves as a mobile educational, healing, and resource center in Minneapolis, Minnesota; a Community Love Fund that distributes recurring cash relief to formerly incarcerated women in Roxbury, Massachusetts; and Community HEAL Circles that create space for those most affected by violence in King County, Washington, to join small groups in a restorative justice process where they have access to childcare, meals, and other resources to support their participation. These “experiments” are led by survivors of violence for people who have lost loved ones to gun violence, and for those with incarcerated loved ones. They create circles of community, healing, and love for formerly incarcerated persons that allow them to explore topics such as trauma, shame, accountability, structural and generational violence, and their impacts on our bodies.
most of us just don’t have the time or energy to respond directly to all the incidents of harm and violence in our lives.
But we also see more people of all backgrounds willing to confront the vicious lies on which our social order is built, and they’re demanding an honest curriculum.
As with weathering, structural violence and preventable harms are often carried out by “legitimate institutions” and meted out while people perform routine activities.
The illusion of self-made success, where everything is doable and constraints are largely absent, is only possible because the world has been cleared of obstacles in advance.
The challenge is not how to attract underrepresented groups to STEM but how to stop repelling them!
We can either take this moment to continue that pattern [of white flight] by retreating into the comfort of our own advantages, or we can act to dismantle racist educational policies, fight for equitable distribution of school funding and build authentic community with one another. Now is the time to reimagine our beliefs, our lives and what we’re willing to do to create a future that works for all children.
My point, one that I want to scream from the mountaintops, is that “intelligence” is not a genetic trait inherent to certain groups. Instead, it is socially manufactured—produced by the resources and attention one gets at home and the opportunities and “gifts” one experiences at school.
essential workers, one of those prophylactic phrases that oozes from the lips of politicians and pundits as they try to conceal the many ways in which people are made disposable. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic: essential to praise, essential to exploit, essential to gaslight. Against this rhetoric, we must insist that those who do the thankless work that keeps society afloat, those who make the sausage, are essential to care about, essential to listen to, essential to lead, essential to fucking pay.
collective bargaining has resulted in 25 percent higher overall salaries, regular raises, pay protections, better benefits, and professional development funds.
Solidarity, it bears repeating, is not charity. It is born out of the recognition that our fates are linked.
On these campuses, faculty can organize as a union, a faculty senate, or simply a group to demand more funding for higher education from state and federal governments. They can also demand a greater role in governance decisions, especially about jobs, and work toward more stable tenure-track positions. But casting our sights even further, now is the time for a collective reckoning at institutions that tout their commitment to the “public good” but too often put their private interests first. Those billion-dollar endowments I mentioned earlier—they are tax exempt, along with the real estate that universities sit on. This same real estate often houses for-profit research in biotech and related fields, wherein the university collects income from patent royalties, copyright and trademark licensing programs, and other ventures, so that higher education is now “a lucrative ‘shelter’ economy.”
So what would it look like for university faculty to link arms with those in overshadowed neighborhoods who are demanding that the university’s policies and its purse get in line with its platitudes?
The point of pulling back the curtain is so that we can set our sights higher, not only demanding just treatment of everyone working on campus but also organizing with those living and working around it. As Baldwin’s work shows, another university is possible, one that “helps meet the local desires for affordable housing, sustainable food systems, cooperatively owned workplaces, and a shared right to the city.”
“What is it that we’re saving all this time for? If we make life totally frictionless then, what, will we just slide to the grave in an Uber?”
As a society, we have the means to guarantee everyone a well-paying job, healthcare, education, and housing. But the way forward requires a substantial redistribution of wealth. Not only that, but true justice also entails guaranteeing that workers’ rights and dignity are codified in law and upheld by institutions and workplaces.
from each according to her ability, to each according to her need.
This reminds us that the seemingly small things, such as providing free breakfast to kids and medical checkups to neighbors, may be more than meets the eye and can have exponential effects—exposing the failure of the Powers That Be and showing what is possible when we work together.
In our everyday lives, we can engender viral justice by creating and fortifying connections with people for mutual support and accountability during times of stress and hardship.
These are small steps to begin owning up to an injurious legacy. But what can individuals—those of us who work in these institutions—and groups, whether universities, hospitals, schools, banks, or other industries that have their own skeletons in the closet, do?
Is it possible to create community-engaged research that interrupts oppressive systems rather than simply reproduces them?”
start divesting from death-making industries, such as policing, prisons, and the military, and strengthening the social fabric that actually helps us thrive.
disability justice refrain—“nothing about us without us.” It turns out that disability and environmental injustice are deeply connected. Insults from the water, air, and soil are imbibed, inhaled, and ingested, getting under people’s skin, especially those already deemed disposable.
We need the loud and ferocious world-builders as much as the quiet and studious ones. The last thing we need is for everyone to do or be the same thing! So whether you want to scream or whisper, write poetry or live it, now is the time.