I think that white people are not seen as people with racial histories.

If you can't do anything but fight, so every single solitary thing, every single solitary day, then the privilege of dreaming becomes something that only a few people have.

I became a part of the Civil Rights movement early on and that has really shaped a great deal of my thinking.

I feel really - actually - quite terrified about the world as it now exists. The kind of sucking the world dry for a dollar seems to me to be even worse (though it was hard for me to imagine 30 years ago that it could get worse) and the idea that bling and profit over human beings is really more and more a credible idea; people don't even examine it with any kind of question: I find that really terrifying.

I worked very hard to try and figure out what I thought and I believed that we were going to succeed and that revolutions would happen globally and we would be a part of that and we would have then not capitalism. We would have values based on human lives, not profit. We would actually transform the kinds of ways people built love and built community. It was a very shocking thing to me, out of the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, to realize that that dream - while I still believed in it - was not going to happen in the way that I had hoped.

We gain power in our refusal to accept less than we deserve.

Frankly, sex work and stripping is very good if you have radical politics. You can go to meetings all night long.