Quote of the Week #6

"People kill me talking about niggers is lazy. Niggers is the most hard-working people in the world. Worked three hundred years for free. And didn't take no lunch hour."
--Holloway in August Wilson's Two Trains Running

Quote of the Week #5

"There cannot be relations of power [as opposed to domination] unless subjects are free. If one were completely at the disposition of the other and became his thing, an object on which he can exercise an infinite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of power. In order to exercise a relation of power, there must be on both sides at least a certain form of liberty."
--Michel Foucault, The Final Foucault (quoted on p. 55 in Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self Making in Nineteenth Century America)

Quote of the Week #4

“They were called the Black Panthers for Self-Defense, and that word ‘self-defense’ is all I needed to hear. It’s what the elders kept telling me. Who’ll defend the black man if he won’t defend himself? The hair stood up on my neck when Bunchy read me a line from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison: ‘Live with your head in the lion’s mouth.’ Bunchy said, “Even better, be the fucking lion!’

Geronimo Pratt