The colonization of the Southern economy by capitalists from the North gave lynching its most vigorous impulse. If Black people, by means of terror a… - Angela Davis

Paradoxically, demands for parity with men's prisons, instead of creating greater educational, vocational, and health opportunities for women prisoners, often have led to more repressive conditions for women. This is not only a consequence of deploying liberal - that is, formalistic - notions of equality, but of, more dangerous, allowing male prisons to function as the punishment norm.

I also think it's important for us to think forward and to imagine future history in a way that is not restrained by our own lifetimes. Oftentimes people say, well, if it takes that long, I'll be dead. So what? Everybody dies, right? And if people who were involved in the struggle against slavery-I'm thinking about people like Frederick Douglass, or Ida B. Wells in the struggle against lynching if they had that very narrow individualistic sense of their own contributions, where would we be today? And so we have to learn how to imagine the future in terms that are not restricted to our own lifetimes.

Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that they will constitute both the beginning and the end of political practice.