"national soil" is a nonsensical idea. Places have history, but soil does not have nationality. Just as the air we breathe has been breathed by milli… - Aurora Levins Morales

I call the work I do "cultural activism" because it does battle in the arena of culture, over the stories we tell ourselves and each other of why the world is as it is. It's a struggle for the imaginations of oppressed people, for our capacity to see ourselves as human when we are being treated inhumanely. Cultural activism is not separate from the work of organizing people to do specific things. In fact, successful organizing depends on this transformation of vision; the most significant outcome of most organizing campaigns is the transformation that takes place in people who participate.

We can't surrender whiteness or maleness, heterosexuality, or the reality of having been born into money, but we can dismantle the lies we have been taught about what those things mean, consciously build relationships of equality and respect with people who are not privileged where we are, assume they know more about that piece of the social landscape than we do, and learn from them. How to acknowledge the injury privilege does to those who have it as well as those who lack it, how to make it clear, to ourselves and to those who have what we do not, that relying on each other instead of our unearned extras is ultimately joyful and deeply rewarding, that the real losses happened long ago, when the privilege was accepted-these are fundamental questions for a much needed theory of solidarity, of how to reweave the torn fabric of our interdependence. ("Class Privilege and Loss")

Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.