Sexual Pondering

"Capitalism doesn’t inspire creativity, it stifles it. There are millions of geniuses that might be doing something brilliant, but instead are putting stickers on packets of biscuits they can barely afford for 12 hours a day so some lazy prick can play golf every Sunday with all the other impotent do nothing pricks."

"Recently I appeared on a television talk show opposite three ‘angry white males’ who felt they had been the victims of workplace discrimination. The show’s title was ‘A Black Woman Took My Job’. In my comments to these men, I invited them to consider what the word ‘my’ meant in that title: that they felt the jobs were originally ‘theirs’. But by what right is that ‘his’ job? Only by his sense of entitlement, which he now perceives as threatened by the movement toward workplace gender equality."

"The first evidence of Native American and African unity appears in a l503 communication to Spain’s King Ferdinand from Viceroy Nicolas de Ovando of Spain’s headquarters on Hispaniola, now Haiti. Ovando complained that his enslaved Africans “fled among the Indians and taught them bad customs and never could be captured."

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours"

"Poverty is not simply having no money — it is isolation, vulnerability, humiliation and mistrust. It is not being able to differentiate between employers and exploiters and abusers. It is contempt for the simplistic illusion of meritocracy — the idea that what we get is what we work for. It is knowing that your mother, with her arthritic joints and her maddening insomnia and her post-traumatic stress disordered heart, goes to work until two in the morning waiting tables for less than minimum wage, or pushes a janitor’s cart and cleans the shit-filled toilets of polished professionals. It is entering a room full of people and seeing not only individual people, but violent systems and stark divisions. It is the violence of untreated mental illness exacerbated by the fact that reality, from some vantage points, really does resemble a psychotic nightmare. It is the violence of abuse and assault which is ignored or minimized by police officers, social services, and courts of law. Poverty is conflict. And for poor kids lucky enough to have the chance to “move up,” it is the conflict between remaining oppressed or collaborating with the oppressor."

"To maintain their power, dominant groups create and maintain a popular system of “commonsense” ideas that support their right to rule. In the United States, hegemonic ideologies concerning race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation are often so pervasive that it is difficult to conceptualize alternatives to them, let alone ways of resisting the social practices that they justify."

"Knowledge of the social world and, more precisely, the categories which make it possible, are the stake par excellence of the political struggle, a struggle which is inseparably theoretical and practical, over the power of preserving or transforming the social world by preserving or transforming the categories of perception of that world."