Joy James: Fear Factor, Quantum Entanglement, and Revolutionary Love

Joy James discusses the interconnectedness of our struggles and the fight against the Fear Factor, from the revolutionaries of the 60s and 70s to #StopCopCity today.

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"We know you can take us out, you can bury us in prison on terrorist charges because we're trying to protect a forest, you can shoot us in our bed, you can shoot us when we're walking, talking, etc., etc., and so the Fear Factor actually shapes our political responses that we tag as revolutionary."

"Violence is arrayed against me because I’m Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life."
( - Joy James. 2023. In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities.)

Political theorist Joy James teaches at Williams College. Editor of The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Blackwell, 1998), Imprisoned Intellectuals (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), The New Abolitionists (SUNY Press, 2005) and Warfare in the American Homeland (Duke University Press, 2007), James is also author of Resisting State Violence (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), Transcending the Talented Tenth (Routledge, 1997), Seeking the Beloved Community (SUNY Press, 2013), and New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the Afterlife of Erica Garner (Common Notions, 2023).
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