Philosophical Underpinnings
"We live in the world, taking advantage of our cars, homes, education, health care, and other collective responses to our physical and social needs. Can we do this in a way that causes suffering to others without seeing or addressing the implications for our spiritual well-being and the spiritual well-being of others? Does the answer change if we are passively allowing suffering to be imposed on others to our benefit? It should be clear that I think there are very substantial reasons why the answer to both of these questions is no."
john a. powell, Racing to Justice
"The dispossessed of this nation--the poor, both white and Negro--live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for...to lift the load of poverty."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Conscience is...the location of the ethical demand, a demand that is impossibly demanding, a demand to be infinitely responsible [for the other]."
-Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance
"The most vicious thing about segregation...is it's perpetuation of the mystery of racial difference...there is a magical and omnipotent dispeller of the mystery; it is contact."
Howard Zinn, "The Southern Mystique"
"An encounter, a discovery, a vast wave of strikes, an earthquake: every event produces truth by changing our way of being in the world. Conversely, any observation that leaves us indifferent, doesn't affect us, doesn't commit us to anything, no longer deserves the name truth."
Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection
john a. powell, Racing to Justice
"The dispossessed of this nation--the poor, both white and Negro--live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for...to lift the load of poverty."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Conscience is...the location of the ethical demand, a demand that is impossibly demanding, a demand to be infinitely responsible [for the other]."
-Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance
"The most vicious thing about segregation...is it's perpetuation of the mystery of racial difference...there is a magical and omnipotent dispeller of the mystery; it is contact."
Howard Zinn, "The Southern Mystique"
"An encounter, a discovery, a vast wave of strikes, an earthquake: every event produces truth by changing our way of being in the world. Conversely, any observation that leaves us indifferent, doesn't affect us, doesn't commit us to anything, no longer deserves the name truth."
Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection