Small Great Things

by Jodi Picoult

Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.

As Christina held my hand and Ms. Mina held Mama’s, there was a moment—one heartbeat, one breath—where all the differences in schooling and money and skin color evaporated like mirages in a desert. Where everyone was equal, and it was just one woman, helping another.

She wore an expression I’ve only seen in paintings in museums, of a love and a grief so fierce that they forged together to create some new, raw emotion.

It just goes to show you: every baby is born beautiful. It’s what we project on them that makes them ugly.

long as they can make you think you’re not worthy, they still got you in chains.

because I knew that sometimes when people spoke, it wasn’t because they had something important to say. It was because they had a powerful need for someone to listen.

Have I really never noticed these things before? Or have I been very studiously keeping my eyes shut tight?

The truth was that the Black table made my white friends nervous, because even if they’d sat down there with me, they would have been tolerated but not welcomed. In a world where they always fit in, the one place they didn’t chafed hard.

“In his world, the people with power owned other people. Maybe that’s what he thought he needed to do to feel powerful too.”

The piano keys are black and white but they sound like a million colors in your mind.

How incredibly easy it is to hide behind white skin, I think, looking at these probable supremacists. The benefit of the doubt is in your favor. You’re not suspicious.

If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.

If the first freedom you lose in prison is privacy, the second is dignity.

I may not have much say here, but I still can make the choice to not be a victim.

The loneliest creature on earth is a whale that has spent more than twenty years calling out for a mate, I read, but whose voice is so different from those of other whales that none of them ever respond.

Pride is an evil dragon; it sleeps underneath your heart and then roars when you need silence.

“You say you don’t see color…but that’s all you see. You’re so hyperaware of it, and of trying to look like you aren’t prejudiced, you can’t even understand that when you say race doesn’t matter all I hear is you dismissing what I’ve felt, what I’ve lived, what it’s like to be put down because of the color of my skin.”

“True confession? The reason we don’t talk about race is because we do not speak a common language.”

It’s the difference between dancing along the eggshell crust of acquaintance and diving into the messy center of a relationship. It’s not always perfect; it’s not always pleasant—but because it is rooted in respect, it is unshakable.

“No, because that means white people would have to buy into being equal. Who’d choose to dismantle the system that makes them special?”

One day, you realize there is less of your life left than what you’ve already lived.

There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.

“Prejudice goes both ways, you know. There are people who suffer from it, and there are people who profit from it.

What if the puzzle of the world was a shape you didn’t fit into? And the only way to survive was to mutilate yourself, carve away your corners, sand yourself down, modify yourself to fit?

no matter what face you put on your own personal bogeyman, it gives you nightmares.

That’s what Ruth has been trying to say, but I haven’t listened. She’s brave enough to risk losing her job, her livelihood, her freedom to tell the truth, and I’m the liar. I’d told her race isn’t welcome in the courtroom, when deep down I know it’s already there. It always has been. And just because I close my eyes doesn’t mean it’s gone away.

Maybe if there were lawyers more courageous than I am, fixing the system would be as important as acquitting the client. Maybe I should be more courageous.

Equality is treating everyone the same. But equity is taking differences into account, so everyone has a chance to succeed.”

It’s a little harder to see—and to own up to—the tailwinds of racism, the ways that those of us who aren’t people of color have benefited just because we’re white.

But passive racism? It’s noticing there’s only one person of color in your office and not asking your boss why. It’s reading your kid’s fourth-grade curriculum and seeing that the only black history covered is slavery, and not questioning why. It’s defending a woman in court whose indictment directly resulted from her race…and glossing over that fact, like it hardly matters.

It’s having the grace to say yes, and more important, the right to say no. At the heart of freedom, hope beats: a pulse of possibility.

People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.

I tell them this: the part of the brain, physiologically, that allows us to blame everything on people we do not really know is the same part of the brain that allows us to have compassion for strangers.

Because race is different. Racism is different. It’s fraught, and it’s hard to discuss, and so as a result we often don’t.

I was writing to my own community—white people—who can very easily point to a neo-Nazi skinhead and say he’s a racist…but who can’t recognize racism in themselves.

was discovering that I was not as blameless and progressive as I had imagined.

Instead, the role of the ally is to find other white people and talk to make them see that many of the benefits they’ve enjoyed in life are direct results of the fact that someone else did not have the same benefits.

The point was to redirect the recruit’s rage into racism. Violence became a release, a mandate. They also taught me that now, most skinhead groups are not crews seeking out violence but rather individuals who are networking underground.

I’ve come to see that ignorance is a privilege, too.

Instead, recognize that differences between people make it harder for some to cross a finish line, and create fair paths to success for everyone that accommodate those differences.

I wrote it because I believed it was the right thing to do, and because the things that make us most uncomfortable are the things that teach us what we all need to know.

There is a fire raging, and we have two choices: we can turn our backs, or we can try to fight it. Yes, talking about racism is hard to do, and yes, we stumble over the words—but we who are white need to have this discussion among ourselves. Because then, even more of us will overhear, and—I hope—the conversation will spread.