GRITtv with Laura Flanders

The real reason the system wants to pass hate crimes laws and put our names on it, isn't because the system wants to save our lives but because the system wants to grown in any direction.

What I see right now, and it's because this is what I've been working on for years, is that we are in a particular moment in history where we are looking at state violence, and I think we can use this moment to look at state violence as a way to look at many other things, such as poverty, such as homelessness. These are not unique to the United States, but something that I think is unique is the ways in which state violence is being uplifted in this moment of history. I think we have an opening, which doesn't happen very often, to change policy, to change the culture, and to shift some pretty deadly dynamics.

It is not about us, the privileged, coming up with our form of boycott. It is about us, the privileged, supporting the underprivileged in their just struggle.

I think that most Israelis are not fanatics. They're just apathetic. They don't know, and they don't want to know. They actively do not know. In that sense, I think that that also applies to Americans. Most people in the US don't know much about the ongoing wars of aggression that the US is carrying out in so many places around the world, it's difficult to keep count.

[Black girls] told us that zero tolerance schools - schools where there's a heavy emphasis on punitive measures, punishment rather than active intervention - that those kinds of schools were where they didn't feel safe. Sometimes they didn't even want to come to school.

It is called My Brother's Keeper. It's not called Our Children's Keeper. So, it's pretty clear what the message is. That in and of itself is something that we want to challenge. Because what you don't name and what you don't measure, you generally don't care about. Right? We want to lift the profile and create public will to address boys as well as girls.

Actually Octavia [Butler] is an amazing model of someone who did so much to change the world, sitting at a desk, turned inward, feeling awkward about social interactions and not necessarily seeing herself as a leader.

I think even just having a market-driven economy for anything from energy to our  food system, education, all of those things is really the wrong premise for getting people's needs met.

The wonderful thing about the theater is that it happens in every home that has a small child in it, because that's what children do. They make up - encourage your children to make-up stories. To be characters. Play with them the best you can. Take them to places where people are doing things live. Because there's nothing like it.

I've often said that actually, the MAP test boycott didn't start at my school at Garfield High School; in fact, it began at Lakeside High School, a school down the road where Bill Gates went, where he sends his kids, because they never administered the exam and they wouldn't do that to their own children; reduce teaching and learning to this score and teach to the test.