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Monday, January 23, 2017

GET WOKE, White People! | Bill Ayers

GET WOKE, White People! | Bill Ayers:

GET WOKE, White People!

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The world-wide outpouring of rage immediately following the inauguration of Donald Trump was dazzling and heartening. Women in the lead, connections and intersectionality in the air, humor, art, determination, solidarity—the people rising, the popular opposition on display. I loved so many signs waving in the streets of Washington: “Fight like a girl!”; “If my uterus shot bullets it would have more protection than it does now;” “If it’s not intersectional, it’s not my feminism;” “I love my nasty mom.”
 
We can and we must build a broad social movement in fierce and effective opposition to Trumpism, and for a world in balance.
 
It’s time to organize a powerful resistance.
 
And that means in part getting smart, paying attention, waking up in new ways.
 
White folks need to get over the illusion of innocence.
 
I remember years ago watching a sequence from the documentary, “Shoah.” The film maker was standing in a public square in formerly occupied France within sight of a station where Jews were loaded onto trains and transported to death camps. interviewing a villager. The film maker kept asking what the villager thought at the time. We didn’t know, he said. We didn’t know about the camps. But you knew they were rounded up. Yes, but we didn’t know why. Well, you could see them packed into box cars. Yes, but we didn’t know…
 
The question is, what do you need to know in order to know? Or, from another angle of regard, when is the claim of innocence simply a fraud and a lie?
 
Here in the US, if you look you’ll see that the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex are institutions of congealed violent white GET WOKE, White People! | Bill Ayers: