00:00democracy yields produces creates a fully realized freedom which we know
00:07hasn't hasn't happened but a historical consciousness that thinks of time is
00:13fundamentally interconnected the things of the the evolution of oppression as
00:17opposed to neat endpoints get us to a different place exactly exactly yeah the
00:26whole notion of the post is very problematic post slavery post civil
00:35rights post apartheid post-racialism yeah because when Obama was elected it seems
00:44like a long long time ago everyone was talking about the post-racial state of
00:52affairs because the the last barrier had been brought down but of course we very
01:01quickly recognized that we're still living the afterlives of slavery and the
01:10afterlives of apartheid and the afterlives of Jim Crow us we see it in in the fact
01:18that there are more people behind bars in the u.s. than in any other country in
01:25the world that the the prison has become a place where the detritus of the current
01:37capitalists arrangement you know those who were the victims of deindustrialization
01:49and so forth and so on we're never actually beyond that which we think we
01:54have overcome and it's hard to think in those terms because we want to believe
02:04that there will come a moment when everything changes when as Walter
02:10Benjamin used to say when the the the the clocks are reset when everything
02:17fundamentally changes and I think so many people were drawn to the struggle
02:25against apartheid in South Africa because South Africa really represented the
02:30possibility of a possibility of a new world not just for people in this country but
02:36for everyone the possibility of of a society without racism or without sexism
02:45without homophobia and when it didn't happen in the way we had imagined it many
02:56people turn their attention elsewhere we were talking earlier about being aware of what is
03:07happening in other countries you know people in other parts of the world being
03:12aware of the the ways in which things are changing the the major struggle that
03:21students engaged in the fees must fall movement the structure of society did not
03:27change but they won in terms of providing access to education for people who
03:36would never before seen themselves as recipients of a higher education I don't
03:46see I also think it's important even when we don't win what we want to win
03:51to claim our victories because if we don't claim our victories then that means
03:59that all of the work that we do the organizing the struggle doesn't make a
04:05difference so we have to claim even the small victories we have to claim
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