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A racist culture had handed me the ammunition to shoot Black people, to shoot myself, and I took and used it. Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime.
Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations.
do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
White people are more likely than Black and Latinx people to sell drugs, and the races consume drugs at similar rates. Yet African Americans are far more likely than Whites to be jailed for drug offenses.
killed twenty-two Black people for every White person in the early 1980s.
But few connected the increase in unemployment to the increase in violent crime.
Only racists shy away from the R-word—racism is steeped in denial.
When geneticists compare these ethnic populations, they find there is more genetic diversity between populations within Africa than between Africa and the rest of the world.
They fail to realize that if we stop using racial categories, then we will not be able to identify racial inequity. If we cannot identify racial inequity, then we will not be able to identify racist policies. If we cannot identify racist policies, then we cannot challenge racist policies. If we cannot challenge racist policies, then racist power’s final solution will be achieved: a world of inequity none of us can see, let alone resist.
To be antiracist is to also recognize the living, breathing reality of this racial mirage, which makes our skin colors more meaningful than our individuality.
must be kept American,” President Calvin Coolidge said when he signed the 1924 law.
the facts that the majority of Americans on welfare are not African American and the majority of African Americans eligible for welfare refuse it.
To be antiracist is to view national and transnational ethnic groups as equal in all their differences.
Not all individuals migrate, but those who do, in what’s called “immigrant self-selection,” are typically individuals with an exceptional internal drive for material success and/or they possess exceptional external resources.
Black people comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population. And yet, in 2015, Black bodies accounted for at least 26 percent of those killed by police,
We, the young Black super-predators, were apparently being raised with an unprecedented inclination toward violence—in a nation that presumably did not raise White slaveholders, lynchers, mass incarcerators, police officers, corporate officials, venture capitalists, financiers, drunk drivers, and war hawks to be violent.
Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists. If we don’t, then we are blamed for our own assaults, our own deaths.
low-income neighborhoods struggle with unemployment and poverty—and their typical byproduct, violent crime.
Racial-group behavior is a figment of the racist’s imagination. Individual behaviors can shape the success of individuals.
White male offenders with African facial features receive harsher sentences than their all-European peers.
The only thing wrong with White people is when they embrace racist ideas and policies and then deny their ideas and policies are racist.
White racists do not want to define racial hierarchy or policies that yield racial inequities as racist. To do so would be to define their ideas and policies as racist. Instead, they define policies not rigged for White people as racist. Ideas not centering White lives are racist.
White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be—and still is—teeming with millions of struggling White people.
Diop’s two-cradle theory suggested the harsh climate and lack of resources in the northern cradle nurtured in Europeans barbaric, individualistic, materialist, and warlike behaviors, which brought destruction to the world. The amenable climate and abundance of resources in the southern cradle nurtured the African behaviors of community, spirituality, equanimity, and peace, which brought civilization to the world.
Way interesting
Black people can’t be racist because Black people don’t have “institutional power,”
The powerless defense strips Black policymakers and managers of all their power.
Antiracist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anticapitalist policies. Anticapitalism cannot eliminate class racism without antiracism.
The world’s 3.5 billion poorest adults, comprising 70 percent of the world’s working-age population, own 2.7 percent of global wealth.
Estimated losses from white-collar crimes are believed to be between $300 and $600 billion per year, according to the FBI. By comparison, near the height of violent crime in 1995, the FBI reported the combined costs of burglary and robbery to be $4 billion.
When people contend that Black spaces do not represent reality, they are speaking from the White worldview of Black people in the minority. They are conceptualizing the real American world as White. To be antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as the “real world,” only real worlds, multiple worldviews.
What really made the schools unequal were the dramatically unequal resources provided to them, not the mere fact of racial separation.
The logical conclusion of antiracist strategy is open and equal access to all public accommodations, open access to all integrated White spaces, integrated Middle Eastern spaces, integrated Black spaces, integrated Latinx spaces, integrated Native spaces, and integrated Asian spaces that are as equally resourced as they are culturally different.
No wonder Black feminists have been saying from the beginning that when humanity becomes serious about the freedom of Black women, humanity becomes serious about the freedom of humanity.
Harmless White fun is Black lawlessness.
We formulate and populate and donate to cultural and behavioral and educational enrichment programs to make ourselves feel better, feeling they are helping racial groups, when they are only helping (or hurting) individuals, when only policy change helps groups.
The United States is a racist nation because its policymakers and policies have been racist from the beginning.
While suburban White teenage boys partied and drank and drove and smoked and snorted and assaulted to a chorus of “boys will be boys,” urban Black boys faced zero tolerance in a policed state.
