Ruha Benjamin Imagination Quotes

Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.

After all, why is it that we can so readily imagine growing heart cells in a lab, but not growing empathy for other human beings in our everyday lives? For many, the idea that we can defy politics as usual and channel human ingenuity towards more egalitarian forms of social organization is far-fetched. Our collective imaginations tend to shrink when confronted with entrenched inequality and injustice when what we need is just as much investment and innovation in our social reality as we pour into transforming our material lives.

Because those who monopolize resources monopolize imagination.

As Kamal Sinclair – emerging media researcher and artist – posits: Story and narrative are the code for humanity’s operating system. We have used stories to communicate knowledge, prescribe behavior, and imagine our futures since our earliest days. Story and narrative inform how we design everything from technology to social systems. They shape the norms in which we perform our identities, even perhaps the mutations of our DNA and perceptions of reality. Stories are the first step in the process of how we imagine our reality; they literally make our reality.84

The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong,” implores Arundhati Roy, “would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination . . . outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment.

We do not usually think of our contemporary society as eugenic. But look closer . . . from who gets access to scarce resources when hospitals don’t have enough supplies for all patients, to who gets warehoused in U.S. jails because they cannot afford bail, some lives are deemed desirable and others disposable.

Fleetwood also calls attention to the “fraught imaginaries” of nonprofit prison art collaborations. The problem with nonprofits is that while many are well-intentioned, they are at the whim of what donors want and what prison administrators will agree to. Not to mention, most of these nonprofits rose to prominence through, and now often retain funding from, the increase in prison populations.

Is the Bullet Blocker NIJ IIIA Sprout Backpack a “failure of imagination,” or simply the natural extension of a eugenic imagination that displaces deadly social problems onto individuals, asking the most vulnerable to literally shoulder the problem?

These two options—investing in punishment versus investing in people—represent distinct policy alternatives, and also radically different imaginations. The first puts the existing death-making structure on life support, whereas the second aims to regenerate a besieged body politic. Which one will we invest in?

Filmmaker Alex Rivera put it well: “The battle over real power tomorrow begins with the struggle over who gets to dream today.

Whether we turn to children playing in the sand or tech billionaires offering us solutions while they build underground bunkers to survive the climate emergency, it matters whose imaginations get to materialize as our shared future.

These “start-up nations” represent Silicon Valley elites’ vision to once and for all “cede from the state, both territorially and politically” and be completely free from the regulatory hold of all existing governments. Talk about a wildly insular imagination.

Geoff Mulgan warns that humanity faces an imaginary crisis, or “the deteriorating state of our shared social imagination.” Perhaps, though, it is not naturally deteriorating but actively arrested, given the deep social fault lines and deadly inequalities that impact not only our everyday lives but our ability to imagine something different.

While the proliferation of nonprofit prison art collaborations may seem like a promising alternative to total creative deprivation in carceral facilities, scholar Baz Dreisinger describes the trend as “smoke screens, obstructing our view of the big picture, which is that when it comes to justice and safety and human treatment, prisons simply don’t make sense.

We are forced to accept, then, that our imaginations are not simply a force for good in the world, a capacity that we develop and then set free. Rather, given the power to do harm through oppressive imaginaries of all types, we must critically examine, challenge, and potentially purge our imaginations whenever they become infected by a “fatal coupling of power and difference.

How else could she survive, could any of us survive, without the ability to envision a world, even if only with the companions we are able to conjure out of the earth, where we are free simply to be?

In Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, coeditor Walidah Imarisha writes, “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction.

Standardized testing has always been predicated on a racist, classist, sexist, and ableist standard.

A world that relies on social inequality to keep its machinery running can only afford for a handful of people to imagine themselves “gifted.” Gifted = destined leaders and bosses, visionaries and innovators who have the time and resources to design the future while the masses are trained to sit still, raise their hands, and take instruction.

Imagination is a field of struggle, not an ephemeral afterthought that we have the luxury to dismiss or romanticize.

As each new generation expands their imagination, let them also develop a keener ability to detect bullshit.

Kelley laments, “There are very few contemporary political spaces where the energies of love and imagination are understood and respected as powerful social forces,” then our aim here is to carve out those spaces by all means possible.

the law is never enough to uphold (or overthrow) unjust systems.