More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 15 - February 20, 2022
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html.)
Saving
white privilege is about the word white, not rich. It’s having advantage built into your life. It’s not saying your life hasn’t been hard; it’s saying your skin color hasn’t contributed to the difficulty in your life.
This seems to be a particularly difficult concept for so many to understand or comprehend.
In the time of slavery, black women were often sexually exploited by white men. (Read up on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.) Now, imagine you were a black man and the woman you’d claimed as your wife (legal marriages between slaves weren’t allowed) was raped by your white master or overseer. Not only was she raped but she was impregnated and gave birth to the master’s child, and there was nothing you could do about it. Try to imagine the kind of hurt and anger you’d feel if this happened to you once, twice; if it happened to your children; if you suspected it had and would go on for
...more
I want to leave you with this: if you see a black man and he is angry, obviously don’t assume he’s angry because he’s black, but also don’t assume he’s even angry at anything racism-related in that moment. Let people have emotions. See him as an individual.
We’ve been doing it wrong. The best tough-on-crime bill is a tough—the toughest—on-poverty bill.
Imagine.
Also try the Ava DuVernay miniseries When They See Us, about the miscarriage of justice known as the trial of the Central Park Five.
This is an excellent series.
The beautiful thing about the piano is that you got white keys and you got black keys. And the only way to make the most beautiful, magnificent, and poetic noise is with both sets of keys working in tandem. You can’t just play all white keys, because you won’t maximize what the instrument has to offer. You can’t just play all black keys, because you won’t maximize what the instrument has to offer. But integrate the white and black keys together, and that is when the piano makes a joyful noise. That’s what this “we” is all about. If we can truly integrate white people and black people together,
...more
What a beautiful depiction of harmony in our world. It's been said before, but is so worth repeating.
The New York Times estimates that between fifteen and twenty-six million people demonstrated over George Floyd’s death in the United States alone, making it the largest demonstration in the history of the country. Some researchers number the protestors at twenty-four million worldwide, which would make it the largest mass protest in history, period.
there’s often no difference whatsoever between a riot or a rebellion besides who’s looking at it
defunding the police doesn’t mean abolishing the police, though there are more radical calls for that, too. It instead means redirecting money from police budgets to other government agencies funded by the city. Defunding the police could mean more money for underfunded schools, for mental
The simple version is that an ally is a person from an empowered group who acts to help an oppressed group, even if it costs them the benefits of their power.
THIS!!!
Do good work, but don’t make the mistake of caring more about your intentions than about the impact of your intentions, or seeking out gratitude or praise.
It's not about us!
Let’s think about what this means: race was a political creation, an economic creation—all this hate developed to secure the interest of some seventeenth-century dudes who wanted to get rich growing sugarcane and cotton, who wanted to make sure they’d always be the class on top. Which is to say, racism has always been about power. Which is to say, we invented racism. Which is to say, maybe we can learn to uninvent it, too.
