The fight for education and justice is inseparable from the struggle for economic equality, human dignity and security, and the challenge of developing American institutions along genuinely democratic lines.

Job insecurity, debt servitude, poverty, incarceration and a growing network of real and symbolic violence have entrapped too many young people in a future that portends zero opportunities and zero hopes. This is a generation that has become the new register for disposability, redundancy, and new levels of surveillance and control.

Individual struggles merge into larger social movements.

When we talk about total war, and we talk about war zones, and we talk about the breakdown of the cities, when you exclude questions of race from that discourse, something disappears that's really central to the forms of repression that we're talking about.

We need to take on the new media, and in terms of power and public pedagogy, we need to organize a whole range of people outside of the academy.

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current.

I don't think the media is a reflection of anything. The media is an active political and pedagogical force that shapes reality. If the media were a reflection of anything, then we'd have to raise the question of why it's in the hands of basically six corporations. The media is about power.