Intro to Social Justice Passage IDs

"Indeed, the failure of mainstream Black politics, specifically Black Democrats, to connect with young Black people played a critical role in Kamala Harris's failed bid to become president in 2024. ... In 2024, in an effort to distance herself from the taint of woke, she reduced her appeals to Black audiences to cultural tropes like insider talk about Black sororities and fraternities, while evading any talk about racial justice and economic justice. ... It was insulting."

Author: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Title: "Black Politics and Beyond" (Hammer & Hope)

Significance: A contemporary critique of the Democratic Party's approach to racial politics. It argues that avoiding discussion of structural racial and economic justice in favor of empty cultural appeals is insulting and politically ineffective.

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

Author: Audre Lorde

Significance: A key feminist and activist dictum , cautioning against relying on the very structures, systems, and ideologies (tools) created by the dominant culture (master's house) to achieve true change

“I think of Black people meeting one another in a space away from the diverse cultures and languages that distinguished them from one another, compelled by the circumstance to find ways to speak with one another in a “new world” where Blackness or the darkness of one’s skin and not language would become the space of bonding. How to remember, how to reinvoke this terror. How to describe what it must have been like for Africans whose deepest bonds were historically forged in the place of shared speech to be transported so abruptly to a world where the very sound of one’s mother tongue had no meaning.”

Author: bell hooks

Title: Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994)

Significance:

“This language would need to be possessed, taken, claimed as a space of resistance. I imagine that the moment they realized the oppressor’s language, seized and spoken by the tongues of the colonized, could be a space of bonding was joyous. For in that recognition was the understanding that intimacy could be restored, that a culture of resistance could be formed that would make recovery from the trauma of enslavement possible.”

Author: bell hooks

Title: Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994)

Significance:

“Needing the oppressor's language to speak with one another they nevertheless also reinvented, remade that language so that it would speak beyond the boundaries of conquest and domination. In the mouths of Black Americans in the so-called "New World," English was altered, transformed, and became a different speech. Enslaved Black people took broken bits of English and made of them a counter-language. They put together their words in such a way that the colonizer had to rethink the meaning of English language.”

Author: bell hooks

Title: Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994)

Significance:

“Shifting how we think about language and how we use it necessarily alters how we know what we know.”

Author: bell hooks

Title: Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994)

Significance:

“The power of this speech is not simply that it enables resistance to white supremacy, but that it also forges a space for alternative cultural production and alternative epistemologies – different ways of thinking and knowing that were crucial to creating a counter-hegemonic worldview.”

Author: bell hooks

Title: Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994)

Significance: Explains the power of vernacular/counter-language (like AAVE) as more than mere communication; it is a profound act of decolonization and resistance that allows colonized people to define reality outside the dominant, oppressive worldview

"The very sound of English had to terrify."

Author: bell hooks

Title: Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994)

Significance: Emphasizes the violence and trauma associated with colonial language imposition. It sets up the later argument about how Black Americans subsequently appropriated and reinvented the language as an act of resistance.

From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, ‘research,’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. It is so powerful that indigenous people even write poetry about research. The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples.

Author: Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Title: Decolonizing Methodologies (1999)

Significance: The core argument of Smith's text , framing "research" as a "dirty word" in Indigenous communities. It argues that Western research has historically served as a tool of colonization and extraction of knowledge.

Indigenous peoples across the world have other stories to tell which not only question the assumed nature of those ideals and the practices that they generate, but also serve to tell an alternative story; the history of Western research through the eyes of the colonized. These counter-stories are powerful forms of resistance which are repeated and shared across diverse indigenous communities.

Author: Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Title: Decolonizing Methodologies (1999)

Significance: Calls for the creation of counter-narratives that challenge colonial histories. These "counter-stories are powerful forms of resistance" and are essential for redefining knowledge from an Indigenous perspective.

“Rather it is addressed more specifically to those researchers who work with, alongside and for communities who have chosen to identify themselves as indigenous… If I have one consistent message for the students I teach and the researchers I train it is that indigenous research is a humble and humbling activity.”

“Indigenous peoples” is a relatively recent term which emerged in the 1970s… It is a term that internationalizes the experiences, the issues and the struggles of some of the world’s colonized peoples.

Intersectionality is a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences. The events and conditions of social and political life and the self can seldom be understood as shaped by one factor. They are generally shaped by many factors in diverse and mutually influencing ways. When it comes to social inequality, people’s lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other. Intersectionality as an analytic tool gives people better access to the complexity of the world and of themselves

Author: Patricia Hill Collins, Sirma Bilge

Title: Intersectionality

Significance:

"When mass evacuation becomes the primary response to hurricanes and wildfires, leaders are admitting that they cannot protect their citizens from threats of climate change."

Author: John Biguenet

Title: "Evacuations Are Admissions of Failure" (The Atlantic)

Significance: Critique of governmental abdication of responsibility. It argues that repeated disaster relief failures reveal a fundamental inability (or lack of political will) to protect the most vulnerable from environmental catastrophe and climate change

"That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low... In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast."

Author: Robin Wall Kimmerer

Title: Braiding Sweetgrass (2015)

Significance: The summary of the Eve (Christian) narrative, showing how it establishes a relationship of banishment, domination, and labor with the natural world. This is juxtaposed against the Indigenous worldview (Skywoman) to discuss environmental justice.

"The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world."

Author: Dr. Paul Farmer

Title: Bending the Arc (Film) / Infections and Inequalities

Significance: Core philosophy of Farmer and Partners In Health. It's a foundational ethical statement for global health equity and frames global healthcare disparity as a failure of justice rather than a simple medical issue.

"Finally, this book is lodged as a protest. The inequalities of outcome I describe are, by and large, biological reflections of social fault lines."

Author: Paul Farmer

Title: Bending the Arc (FilInfections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (1999

Significance: Sets the central argument for the Science Unit. It establishes that social inequalities (poverty, racism, exclusion) are the underlying cause of health disparities and advocates for interventions ranging from the clinical to the political

"According to the American Cancer Society's own statistics on breast cancer survival, of the women stricken, only 50% are still alive after three years. This figure drops to 30% if you are poor, or Black or in any other way part of the underside of this society."

Author: Audre Lorde

Title: The Cancer Journals (1980)

Significance: Statistical evidence demonstrating the racial and class bias in healthcare outcomes in the US. It shows that the system is structured to neglect Black and poor women , illustrating Farmer's concept of "biological reflections of social fault lines".

"I refuse to have my scars hidden or trivialized behind lambswool or silicone gel. I refuse to be reduced... from warrior to mere victim, simply because it might render me a fraction more acceptable or less dangerous to the still complacent, those who believe if you cover up a problem it ceases to exist."

Author: Audre Lorde

Title: The Cancer Journals (1980)

Significance: Core expression of resistance against medical and social control. Lorde politicizes her cancer experience, insisting on visibility and agency (warrior) over passive compliance (victim) with a "woman-phobic world"

"When a number of flute players are equal in their art, there is no reason why those of them who are better born should have better flutes given to them; for they will not play any better on the flute, and the superior instrument should be reserved for him who is the superior artist."

Author: Aristotle (as presented in Sandel)

Title:  Justice

Significance: Key example used by Sandel to explain Aristotle’s view of distributive justice and telos. Justice is teleological (determined by purpose) and honorific (must recognize and reward virtue/excellence - in this case, the best artist gets the best flute).

"The goal of politics and the state is not mere life or economic exchange or security, or a framework of rights that is 'neutral among ends,' but rather the realization of 'the good life.'"

Author: Aristotle (as presented in Sandel)

Title: Justice

Significance: Distinguishes Aristotelian political philosophy from modern liberal theories of rights. For Aristotle, the state's purpose (telos) is moral: it must actively cultivate goodness and citizens' virtue to achieve the "good life"

"The US Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds."

Author: Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa

Title: Borderlands/La Frontera (1987)

Significance: Defines the Borderland as a site of violent cultural collision and trauma , a physical and psychological wound created by the forced imposition of political boundaries.

"This land was Mexican once, Was Indian always, And is And will be again."

Author: Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa

Title: Borderlands/La Frontera (1987)

Significance: Historical and political declaration that challenges the legitimacy of the US-Mexico border and US land ownership. It asserts the enduring Indigenous and Mexican claim to the land and the inevitability of its resurgence

"I imagine her then, a twenty-five-year-old woman who was accustomed to jumping on and off buses in India's biggest, busiest city. She was now stuck in an apartment in a mostly white town in the American South and could only go anywhere when her husband drove her... The songs of the mid-to-late '70s that she memorized became an entrée to the American cultural spaces of school and work."

Author: Jyothi Natarajan

Title: "Patti Smith in the Dark" is an essay by Jyothi Natarajan included in the 2016 anthology Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion

Significance: Illustrates the theme of immigrant assimilation, cultural isolation, and language/cultural access in the diaspora. Music (popular culture) became a necessary tool (an entrée) for cultural translation and accessing American social space

"To us, it felt more like a way to appease family than a chance to honor and celebrate the love we shared. And if appeasing family led us down a path that excluded Vani, we wanted instead to turn around and follow her."

Author: Jyothi Natarajan

Title: "Patti Smith in the Dark" is an essay by Jyothi Natarajan included in the 2016 anthology Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion

Significance: Addresses the intersection of sexuality, family expectations, and the institution of marriage in the diasporic context. It shows the narrator's ultimate choice to prioritize a queer kinship bond (following Vani's path) over the pressures of traditional immigrant assimilation and family approval

"We are constantly in transition, trying to negotiate our gender identities and expressions in a societal structure which has no place, no words, and no affirmations for our very lives."

Author: Joelle Ruby Ryan

Title: "Fat, Trans, and Single" (2011)

Significance: A statement on the systemic erasure and violence against non-conforming bodies (gender/size). It highlights the lack of language or institutional support for queer and trans lives, emphasizing a state of constant, forced "transition" in a society designed without them in mind.

"Every sentence felt like a fingertip strumming a neglected chord in my life, creating the most gorgeous music I'd ever heard. Love pushes us to believe, even when reason tells us we should stop. Love compels us to move carefully, to consider the consequences of our actions.... If you can't write about us with love for who we are as a people, what we've survived, what we've accomplished despite all attempts to keep us from doing so; if you can't look at us as we are and feel your pupils go wide, rendering all stereotypes a sham, a poor copy, a disgrace – then why are you writing about us at all?

Author: Alicia Elliott

Title: A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

Significance: Emphasizes the need for love and respect when writing about marginalized and colonized people's experiences. It links the act of storytelling and witnessing to dignity, opposing the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes

"Photography has established in society a 'chronic, voyeuristic relation to the world.'

Author: Susan Sontag

Title: On Photography

Significance: Critique of the politics of representation. This frames the discussion of how non-Native/Western audiences often consume images of marginalized groups (like the "Vanishing Indian") in a detached, objectifying, or commodified manner.

"How many have looked at these men's images of us, thought we were beautiful, bought photos or paintings of us, collected those images, but never once spoken to any of us in person? Never once considered what our lives today are like, or how they personally contribute to our ongoing dispossession and disappearance?"

Author: Alicia Elliott

Title: A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

Significance: Connects visual representation and consumption (the "Vanishing Indian" stereotype ) to the actual lives of Indigenous peoples. It challenges the non-Native spectator's complicity in Indigenous dispossession and historical erasure.

"Our world collapsed from the violence of contact. Colonization was the historical process, and genocide the official policy."

Author: Haunani-Kay Trask

Title: From a Native Daughter / "The Color of Violence

Significance: Highlights the devastating reality of US colonialism in Hawaiʻi. Trask insists on defining the process as genocide and structural violence, rejecting softer language to describe the dispossession and mass death that followed initial contact

"Thus I was born into captivity, a Native person in a racist, anti-Native world.... And so it is for people of color on this continent. We are nonwhite in a white universe... And we are marked by captivity: economic, political, and cultural captivity."

Author: Haunani-Kay Trask

Title: From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai'i

Significance: Personal and political statement defining the post-colonial condition of Native Hawaiians and other peoples of color as one of systemic "captivity". It emphasizes that life in the U.S. is structured within an anti-Native, "white universe"

"The US Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds."

Author: Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa

Title: Borderlands/La Frontera (1987)

Significance: The definitive passage establishing the borderland as a physical and psychic wound. It encapsulates the themes of post-colonial trauma, economic disparity, and the collision of the "First World" (US) and the "Third World" (Mexico/Latin America).

"We have room for but one flag, the American flag. We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."

Author: Theodore Roosevelt

Title: "True Americanism" (1894)

Significance: This is a key articulation of nativism and assimilationist ideology at the turn of the 20th century. It demands that European immigrants shed their culture and language to become "Americans" and reject hyphenated identities (e.g., German-American)

"Our founding ideal[s of] liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle America would have no democracy at all."

Author: Nikole Hannah-Jones

Title: The 1619 Project

Significance: The core argument of The 1619 Project , asserting that the true, imperfect promise of American democracy was fundamentally realized through the struggles and resistance of Black Americans , placing the legacy of slavery at the center of the national narrative.

"Indeed, the failure of mainstream Black politics, specifically Black Democrats, to connect with young Black people played a critical role in Kamala Harris's failed bid to become president in 2024. ... In 2024, in an effort to distance herself from the taint of woke, she reduced her appeals to Black audiences to cultural tropes like insider talk about Black sororities and fraternities, while evading any talk about racial justice and economic justice. ... It was insulting."

Author: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Title: "Black Politics and Beyond" (Hammer & Hope)

Significance: A contemporary critique of the Democratic Party's approach to racial politics. It argues that avoiding discussion of structural racial and economic justice in favor of empty cultural appeals is insulting and politically ineffective

"In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully."

Author: Nikole Hannah-Jones

Title: The 1619 Project

Significance: This passage establishes the historical pivot point of 1619 and the foundational premise of the entire project. It insists that all American history is fundamentally shaped by the institution and legacy of slavery.