I hope that audiences understand that there is a precariousness to black lives in this country that we need to address, that there has always been a precariousness to black lives in this country that we need to address. In fact, our country is built on the precariousness of black lives, the disposability of black lives.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the inherent vulnerabilities of Black lives in America and the urgent need for societal change.
Yance Ford emphasizes the historical and ongoing precariousness faced by Black individuals in the United States, suggesting that their lives are often viewed as disposable. This acknowledgment calls for a deeper understanding and recognition of systemic issues that perpetuate this vulnerability, urging society to confront and address these injustices.
In practice
This quote can be shared at a social justice rally to highlight the importance of addressing racial inequalities.
Everyone in the street where I grew up was given the same message: You can be anything; you can do anything. That wasn't extraordinary; that was ordinary for us. My folks didn't believe in black exceptionalism. There's nothing exceptional about 'You can have that, too' - except when it comes to justice. You can't have that.
In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, 'booming' state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.
Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex.
What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.
As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.
We're willing to spend countless dollars putting people who need help in cages, and then when they get out we say you can't have a job, and you can't have housing, and because you don't have either, we're going to take your kids, too.
Racism has its boot squarely wedged on the neck of black communities, and we don't want to be told that hard work and responsibility are the answer.
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