D.A.T.T. Ideology


As a Nkrumah Toureist, I am interested in seeing all of the continent of Africa & diasporic Africans united under scientific socialism. I am also interested in the complete liberation of all peoples from whiteness, race/ism, patriarchy, capitalism, oligarchy, colonialisms, and settlement. This aligns me with Indigenous peoples all over the world who have and continue to fight against the injustices of dispossession, displacement, & dehumanization.  I am of course aligned with those who are victims of the ‘modernity’ that brought destruction to them, their homelands, bodies, & then stole them away for enslaved labor.  This website is called “Decolonize All The Things” & I stand by that political statement. I am interested in transforming our collective relations with ourselves, others, resources, & all forms of life.

“Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, & sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those dif­ferences, & to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them & their effects upon human behavior & expectation…As Paulo Freire shows so well in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, & which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the op­pressors’ relationships.  Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work & struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals. For Black & white, old and young, lesbian & heterosexual women alike, this can mean new paths to our survival.”

– Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class, & Sex: Women Redefining Difference

“Without community, there is no liberation…but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”

 – Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House

“It is necessary to remember, as we think critically about domination, that we all have the capacity to act in ways that oppress, dominate, wound (whether or not that power is institutionalized). It is necessary to remember that it is first the potential oppressor within that we must resist – the potential victim within that we must rescue – otherwise we cannot hope for an end to domination, for liberation.”

– bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

3 responses to “D.A.T.T. Ideology”

  1. Hey Shay,

    I love your writings on this blog and am inspired that you do teach-ins. We use a lot of the same critical frameworks and scholarship–as I could gather from the blogs. I would love to learn more about your dissertation. I am in my last year, I hope!!! So I have been an absent human rights activist as I have been chanelling all my energy into the dissertation, but luckily the research is focused on social justice pedagogy. I plan to resume my activist work this summer. Hope we can connect. Your work and everything I read about your thesis is so inspiring!
    Sarah

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