“We are people of color living in an age where the consciousness of our intended slaughter is all around us. People of color are increasingly expendable, our government policy both here and abroad. We are operating under a government that is ready to repeat the tragedy of Vietnam in El Salvador and Nicaragua, a government that is on the wrong side of every single battle for liberation taking place on this globe; a government that invaded and conquered the 53-square-mile sovereign state of Grenada, under the pretext that its 110,000 people pose a threat to the United States.
Our newspapers are filled with alleged human rights concern in white Communist Poland as we sanitize with military acceptance and offerings the systematic genocide of apartheid in South Africa, murder and torture in Haiti and EI Salvador. American advisory teams strengthen repressive governments across Central and South America and Haiti, while the warning is just a code name that precedes military aid. The decisions to cut aid to the terminally ill, the elderly, dependent children, food stamps, even school canteens, are made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable homes with two cars and a thousand tax shields.
None of them go to bed hungry at night. Recently, it has been suggested that seniors are hired to work in atomic plants because they are still near the end of their lives. Can any of us here still afford to believe that efforts to reclaim the future can be private or individual? Can anyone here still afford to believe that the pursuit of liberation may be the one and particular province of a particular race, sex, age, religion, sexuality or class?”.
Audre Lorde - “Learning from the 60s” - 1982.
