14 Quotes by Jackie Wang

I was never ready and could you see it in the way time collapsed in my syntax? Because melancholia is the inability to sequentialize.

As Iyko Day notes, Native dispossession occurs through the expropriation of land, while black dispossession is characterized by enslavement and bodily dispossession. (pg. 116)

But what exactly is primitive accumulation? It entails the creation of a labor market and a system of private property achieved through the violent process of dispossessing people of their land and ways of life so that they can be converted into workers for capitalists. (pg. 102)

The financialization of municipalities, the loss of key tax revenue streams, deindustrialization, and capital flight are the causes of the fiscal crisis—not reckless public spending. (pg. 153)

Increasingly, municipalities (and companies contracted by municipalities) are behaving like businesses, viewing residents as potential sources of revenue, as well as viewing the generation of revenue via fines as a form of productivity. (pg. 156)

However, to maintain a good credit rating during periods when revenue is lagging, municipalities must fuck over residents by implementing austerity measures such as firing public employees, cutting pension funds and health-care benefits, weakening the power of labor unions, cutting the education budget, and so forth. (pg. 175)

In April 2014 a settlement agreement was reached in court, and Detroit had to pay $85 million to USB AG and Bank of America Corporation to terminate the swaps. The use of variable-rate instruments, such as swaps, to finance debt was the single "biggest contributing factor to the increase in Detroit's legacy expenses." (pg. 169)

The conversion of poverty into a personal moral failure was intimately tied to the construction of black Americans as disposable and subject to mass incarceration. (pg. 85)

As the U.S. deindustrialized and the welfare state was gutted (a process that started in the 1970s), the solution to the problem of what to do with the unemployed people who had migrated to cities to become industrial workers—as well as the mentally ill people housed in hospitals that were shutting down en masse—was racialized mass incarceration. (pg. 56)