Eugene Puryear Quotes
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I think what drives me is a sense of, well, who is going to do it if you don't do it? I think that one of the things that we've seen over time, especially with progressive social movements, is most of them - it's surprising to people - are sort of driven by that.
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If someone asked me about the most effective way to take political action, I would not counsel them to do that first. … What I will say is that when things like that happen, I’m not going to go back in retrospect and tell those people that they were wrong. The way people cry out is always going to be diverse.
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I believe tactics have to be based on a strategy of creative tension. … If what you’ve done is made everything about ‘Oh, they just broke a bunch of windows,’ not ‘Oh, man, this is serious,’ you’re in trouble. That being said, if you look at what happened in Baltimore, there was a lot of righteous anger in that uprising that did advance the conversation. It wasn’t until Baltimore that people started seriously talking about the social conditions in a lot of these communities.
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As the movement matures, a lot of us are starting to look at that conundrum. If we feel like [the media] didn’t say what we were talking about, maybe we need to also think about how we can be more intentional about messaging our actual demands.
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I think one of the great things that I have seen happen since the rise of the movement for black lives is the growth of more training and leadership spaces.
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If we’re not constantly evaluating whether what we’re doing is actually making a difference, then we will fail. Obviously a lot of the tactics have been disruptive. People have blocked highways. In some cities they’ve blocked subways. … I think the highway blocking is fair game. In terms of some of the other stuff, I think most of the time it’s ill-conceived, even if well-meaning. … If you’re walking down the street, and you were to break a car window, you don’t even know who’s car it is, it could be someone who supports you.
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Usually, being a volunteer organizer essentially means that I am part of a core base of individuals, that when we start a project - whether it be a big thing like the inauguration or whether it be something that's a longer-term, let's say, educational campaign about a foreign policy issue or a domestic issue - we sit together and we divvy up, and oftentimes it's relevant to different things we do.
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An hour to one person might be way more than like a week to somebody else.
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I got involved as an activist when I was in high school, around the Iraq war. That's how I got involved. It seemed like, OK, we're going to go to war. It doesn't seem like a good idea. Someone should do something. I'm looking around and, like, I am someone, and I might not be able to do everything, but I can do something.
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For thirty years, we’ve been saying “more cops, more prisons, tougher laws.” Not only hasn’t it really worked in terms of crime, but beyond that the fallout has been so significant.
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I think, by and large, the way big social change happens is every individual person taking on whatever little piece they can take on.