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Definitions anchor us in principles. This is not a light point: If we don’t do the basic work of defining the kind of people we want to be in language that is stable and consistent, we can’t work toward stable, consistent goals.
Racial justice is building a society where everyone of every race has an affordable, safe, and comfortable roof over their head.
Justice in a structural sense is when people experience nurturing and restorative love from policies and from their makers and defenders, who are being held accountable by the people. Injustice in a structural sense is when people experience destructive harm from policymakers and policies and from people who are usually immune to accountability.
Racist voting policy has evolved from disenfranchising by Jim Crow voting laws to disenfranchising by mass incarceration and voter-ID laws.
Republicans not only tried to overturn the election results through violently storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, they led the charge to introduce more than 440 voter suppression bills in 49 states that year.
If the system was “equally open,” then there would not be “some disparity in impact.”
No one becomes a racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other in each moment.
Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.
To be an antiracist is a radical choice in the face of this history, requiring a radical reorientation of our consciousness.
I have leaned into describing ideas and policies, and not identifying who individuals are in a permanent sense. I try to describe what individuals are being in moments of time.
Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy.
reverted to striving to save and civilize Black people rather than liberate them.
Race is a mirage but one that we do well to see, while never forgetting it is a mirage, never forgetting that it’s the powerful light of racist power that makes the mirage.
Powerful and brilliant intellectuals in the tradition of Gomes Eanes de Zurara then produced racist ideas and races to justify the racist policies of their era, to redirect the blame for their era’s racial inequities and injustices away from those policies and onto people.
We often see and remember the race and not the individual. This is racist categorizing, this stuffing of our experiences with individuals into color-marked racial closets.
The word “racism” went out of fashion in the bipartisan haze of racial progress—Obama’s political brand—and many Republicans and Democrats started to treat “racist” as the equivalent to the N-word, a vicious pejorative rather than a descriptive term.
Imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a capitalistic world—it allows the inequality to exist and persist undetected.
Terminating racial categories is potentially the last, not the first, step in the antiracist struggle.
To be antiracist is to recognize one human race and the reality of biological equality, that skin color is as meaningless to our underlying humanity as the clothes we wear over that skin.
Individuals organized together created the structure. Individuals organized together will ultimately abolish this structure and construct an equitable and just structure of antiracism.
I offered data that disproved his ethnic racist ideas—e.g., the facts that Black (31.3 percent), White (30.3 percent), and Latinx (29.8 percent) people receive welfare at similar rates, and states with larger Black populations tend to offer the lowest welfare benefits.
immigrants and migrants of all races tend to be more resilient and resourceful when compared with the natives of their own countries and the natives of their new countries. Sociologists call this the “migrant advantage.”
