the arguments against the enfranchisement of children are identical to those used to oppose suffrage for women, immigrants, former slaves, the illite… - Aurora Levins Morales
" "the arguments against the enfranchisement of children are identical to those used to oppose suffrage for women, immigrants, former slaves, the illiterate, and the poor in general. "They are innocent and cannot understand politics. They will be taken advantage of and manipulated by the political interests of those more sophisticated than they. They aren't ready for the responsibility." But what readies people for responsibility is being allowed to take some. People become informed and savvy about those areas of life where they can exercise some power. It is powerlessness that creates passivity. When children are treated with respect, given choices, and expected to have opinions that matter, they develop opinions and make choices. I wonder what it must have been like, what dignity it must have conferred on children of the Iroquois Confederacy that any child over three was welcome to speak about matters of group importance in the tribal council. One of the most politicizing experiences of my life was the summer I spent in Cuba when I was fourteen. Overnight I found myself in a country in which fourteen-year-olds could make major life decisions-for instance, to join the merchant marine, drill with the militia, or choose special vocational training without parental permission.
English
Collect this quote
About Aurora Levins Morales
Aurora Levins Morales (born February 24, 1954) is a Puerto Rican Jewish writer and poet. She is significant within Latina feminism and Third World feminism as well as other social justice movements.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Aurora Levins Morales
now it seems to me that Zionism asks too little, not too much! They have traded in that City of the vision for a cramped fortress tower, believing that Jews will always be persecuted, hunted. That most of humanity couldn't care less if it happened again. Would let it happen. Knowing some of humanity would even applaud. Believing there is no other way for Jews to survive. I want to shout it at them from the rooftops, to cry it out loud: you have never asked for enough! Zionism, at least as it's lived today, accepts anti-Semitism, says it's permanent in the world: As long as there are Jews, there will be Jew-haters, Jew-killers, so we'll build a wall of bodies around us and live behind it, a menace to our neighbors, trying to feel safe. I stand here and cry out to you: "Come out of the trenches! Ask for it all! I demand for myself, and my children who will also be Jews, and for you, too, my soldiering kin, a world where fortresses are unknown and unnecessary."
Taking responsibility for our place in the social relations of power doesn't mean volunteering to go under. It means dedicating ourselves and our resources to unmaking the structures of inequality, jumping from the burning building of piracy into a net held by many hands. ("Class Privilege and Loss")
This...is what I dream of. Multitudes of women, all kinds of women, arguing, disagreeing, fighting it out, lifting our thoughts up out of the fields and cities and prisons and homes, not to carry the sky but to fill it, making our own wind, strong enough to topple towers and pollinate a whole new world into bloom. ("My Feminism")
Loading...