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February 4 - February 6, 2022
Everything great is birthed through discomfort.
After the late 1960s, black came into its own. One of the main arguments for using black was that it created a parallel with white.
Avoid lumping people into groups in general. Meet your peers as individuals. Affirm people’s particularities and differences. That’s what makes us human.
LBJ said it best: “You can’t shackle and chain someone for hundreds of years, liberate them to compete freely with the rest and still justly believe that you’ve been fair.”
For many white people, white privilege is the power of feeling normal. It’s the silent reinforcement of being able to walk into a store and see its main displays show products that cater to you. It’s the ability to turn on the TV and see people who look like you represented in all walks of life. It’s passing the corner office at work and seeing someone who could have been you once upon a time, and maybe finding mentors who “see themselves in you.” It’s never wondering whether the name on your résumé is “too white”; it’s talking the way your local news anchor talks, the way the authorities say
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What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture? —AMANDLA STENBERG
For one, it trivializes historic oppression. It also lets people show love for a culture while still remaining prejudiced toward the people of the culture and lets privileged people profit from the labor of oppressed people.
On cultural appropriation.
Not only did the film inspire the second coming of the KKK, it was also shown in the White House and impressed President Woodrow Wilson so much that he commented, “It’s like history written in lightning.”
On Birth of a Nation
The murderous practice of lynchings, so white men claimed, often had at its heart the goal of protecting the chastity of white women.
Karen is also the granddaughter of a much older figure, “Miss Ann.” Miss Ann was the name enslaved black people gave to white mistresses who exerted power over them on plantations.
Imagine what you heard was: You’re an animal. Imagine you heard, You’re stupid. You’re a slave. My people owned your people, and you were better off when they did. Imagine that you heard, You won’t amount to anything, boy. And the nothing you get is exactly what you deserve. If you can picture one word communicating all of that, then you’ll have some sense of what hearing the N-word does to me and any other black person in America.
Nigga is a term of endearment between some black people—the softening of the hard ER is key, as is the fact that it’s reserved for intimate, black-to-black exchanges. It’s a way for black people to commune, to create a space that’s only for us. It is not, like any of the other forms of the word, a word that is available to white people.
For starters, a definition: systemic racism is the legitimizing of every dynamic—historic, cultural, political, economic, institutional, and person-to-person—that gives advantages to white people, while at the same time producing a whole host of terrible effects for black people and other people of color.
Founded in 1636, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in America. The oldest historically black college and university (HBCU) is Cheyney University, founded in 1837.
What is reverse racism if it’s not, well, real? It’s a prime example of what scholar Alice McIntyre calls white talk: a.k.a. strategies white people use—consciously or not—to insulate themselves from their collective participation in racism.
If you want to oppress someone, you’re gonna need power over them as a group—and no group holds it over white people.
the unfairness black people have experienced has been the point of systemic racism, not the by-product of some other objective. What white people experience as unfairness as a result of Affirmative Action does not have as its aim being unfair to white people.
When people proclaim that black lives matter, it’s not about saying white lives don’t matter. It is a given in this country that they do. What black people are really and truly saying is that black lives matter as well as white lives.
It actually comes from the Hindi word thuggee, which means “deceiver” or “thief” or “swindler.” Thugs stole and murdered in India for more than five hundred years. The word didn’t catch on in America until Mark Twain wrote about them in the 1800s, in work that colored the word with the connotation of a gangster.
Researchers say black people that experience chronic racism can develop something called racial battle fatigue, a state that includes, among other symptoms, anxiety, worry, hypervigilance, headaches, and increased heart rate and blood pressure.
a baby’s race was determined by its mother, which was another way of saying that white men fornicating with or raping their slaves couldn’t produce freedom for their offspring.
black people had received both their civil and voting rights before they were allowed to legally marry white people.
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.
the NYPD’s annual budget is $5.5 billion, so big that if you were to compare it to other countries—yes, countries—it would make it the thirty-sixth-largest defense budget in the world.
What you don’t want your allyship to become is an instance of the white savior complex. A white savior is a white person who acts to help nonwhite people, but in a context that can be perceived as self-serving. A white savior is someone motivated by thinking something like this: I have to save black people, because without me, they won’t be able to save themselves.
Ending racism is not a finish line that we will cross. It’s a road we’ll travel.
Calling someone a slave is like saying that’s what they were: like they were born into this identity, like what’s happening to them is in line with who they are. Enslaved, on the other hand, puts emphasis on what happened. Enslaved says black people weren’t naturally born as slaves: they were coerced into slavery. Enslaved puts the emphasis on what white people did to black people.
Africans were mostly forced into their dispersion, while in America, the Europeans mostly came of their own volition (and also, of course, sans chains).
