Zena Kay Gresham > Zena's Quotes

“If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity.”
― Albert Einstein

“Being able to extend grace and to forgive people sets us free.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“Looking back on this moment, I wonder if the students at that table were so nice because they felt sorry for me. I was dressed like a peasant, after all, and I obviously had no friends. Regardless of their motivations, they were incredibly kind to me, almost sympathetic.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“The more I learned about race in college—that it has no genetic underpinnings, but is a social construct—the less obligated I felt to check WHITE”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“Cultural appropriation is a tricky subject. It’s often viewed as one of the great sins of our times—an indefensible act of racism—as it typically involves people from a majority ethnic group borrowing cultural elements from a minority ethnic group and exploiting those elements for fun or profit.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“Whenever I think about fishing, I’m always reminded of a passage from one of Grandpa Perkins’ speeches in which he gave the old proverb “If you give a man a fish . . .” a decidedly new twist. “If you teach a man to fish,” he said, “he may never eat because all that really matters is—who owns the pond.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“Larry and Ruthanne had taught me that sex was for procreation, not enjoyment, that it should be saved for marriage, and that once I was married I must “lie completely still” as my husband completed the task. Following these rules, I came to fear not only sex but intimacy and relationships as well.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“Being betrayed by one’s parents always comes as a shock.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“God’s law required me to submit to male authority, and if I didn’t, I wouldn’t go to Heaven. Now that I was married I needed to yield to my husband’s will, even if that meant burying my own thoughts, feelings, and identity.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“I stopped attending church for the first time in my life and began a process of redefining my faith in more spiritual terms. Up until that point, the power of religious guilt had me firmly in its grasp and the possibility of eternal punishment was omnipresent. I often found myself atoning for merely existing and hating my body and myself. Now, no longer!”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“And for Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old high school student, it was carrying candy while walking through a gated community in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, 2012; he died after George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch coordinator, confronted Martin and shot him in the chest. When Trayvon Martin was shot—and even more so when George Zimmerman was later acquitted—mothers of Black boys nationwide went into a state of emergency, and I was no different.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“But from my experience dealing with hate groups I can tell you that ignoring them is not the best strategy. Threats that get ignored don’t go away. They fester. They gain momentum. And soon the little problem you once casually disregarded has turned into an enormous one you’ll never be able to forget.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“Americans, by and large, were racist as fuck.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“As he was putting his books in his locker one day, a white male student pointed at Izaiah’s brand-new Air Jordans and said, “Those are some real nigger shoes.” What was most disturbing about this incident was that it wasn’t an aberration but a regular occurrence.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“While I may have been able to flee the racial discrimination that was so common in Birmingham when I was a child, it continued to haunt me throughout my adult life. I did my best to combat racism with the most positive attitude”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“In the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court attempted to clarify the existing racial classifications when it established the “one drop rule”—those with a single Black relative, no matter how distant, were considered Black, even if they appeared white—but this decision only muddled an already complicated issue.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“Oh, the Bible and its curses! One of the best known occurs in Genesis 9 and involves Noah, his son Ham, and a very drunken night. After Ham visits his father’s tent and finds him highly intoxicated and completely naked, Ham tells his brothers Shem and Japheth, who cover their father with a garment while averting their eyes. Noah responded by condemning Ham’s son Canaan to a life as “a servant of servants.” Most curses in the Bible are generational, which means Noah was censuring all of Ham and Canaan’s descendants as well. Although race is never mentioned in the passage, an error in translation—some interpreted “Ham” to mean “dark” or “black”—engendered the idea that Noah had cursed all Black people,”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“The idea that Black people are victims of the so-called Curse of Ham, that they actually deserve to be treated poorly, remains embedded in our collective psyche to this very day.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“A LITTLE GIRL, my skin was pale, my hair blonde, and my face full of freckles. While I may have looked like Laura Ingalls Wilder, that’s not how I felt. I loved drawing pictures of myself when I was young, and whenever it came time to shade in the skin, I usually picked a brown crayon rather than a peach one. Peach simply didn’t resonate with me. I felt like brown suited me better and was prettier. I could see that my skin was light, but my perception of myself wasn’t limited to what my eyes could take in.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“If you’re having fun, you’re sinning” was the message my parents drilled into my head at a very young age. Taught that my natural behavior was somehow wrong, I learned to censor and repress myself, and cried myself to sleep nearly every single night during my tween and teen years, with my face jammed into a pillow so nobody would hear.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“the whole world rejects you, what’s the point in sticking around? Life is already too difficult and too painful to take on the added burden of being without a community, quarantined in solitary confinement psychologically, intuitively, and emotionally. Was there a place for me in this world?”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“If I was to stay healthy, I knew I needed to limit the amount of sorrow in my life and increase the amount of love.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“As I learned about U.S. history in school, I empathized with those whose free labor helped build this country. It never fails to trouble my mind (and hurt my heart) to think that just over a hundred and fifty years ago in the so-called land of the free, people owned other people. The institution of chattel slavery in America was as horrific as it was unconscionable.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“Meanwhile, those committing these human rights abuses did so with a clear conscience, as they believed they were the “superior race.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“For Black slaves to survive such sustained trauma took an incredible amount of inner fortitude and day-to-day resourcefulness. Learning a different language (while being denied the ability to read) and navigating the ways of a strange new culture were matters of survival. From food and shelter to hair care and clothing, ingenuity was a skill passed from one generation of slaves to the next.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“WHEN I TELL PEOPLE I STILL IDENTIFY AS BLACK, they want to know why. I explain that Black is the closest descriptive category that represents the essential essence of who I am. For me, Blackness is more than a set of racialized physical features.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“I got punished so frequently that I began to believe what the derogatory comments about my difficult birth, my obstinacy, and my “carnal nature” had always implied: that I was born evil and was destined to go to Hell. For me, sin lurked around every corner, and I could never predict its arrival.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“Larry and Ruthanne also made me stay home from school on days when sex education was taught because they were convinced that it encouraged fornication, and fornication led to Hell. I was supposed to be a virgin when I got married, so, according to them, I didn’t need to know anything about sex until I had a husband. By effectively keeping me cloistered in a nunnery, they succeeded only in making me laughably ignorant.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“a woman, possessing many of the qualities I would come to admire, including independence, creativity, and willpower. These traits were frowned upon in my family because they were considered rebellions against God and I was often told that I possessed all three.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World

“That the men in our family got to traipse around naked, while I had to wear outfits that resembled those favored by Mennonite women, taught me at a very young age to feel guilty about my appearance and contributed to me developing all sorts of body image issues down the road. Ruthanne prohibited me from wearing pants because, as she explained to me, “Pants separate a woman’s legs, and that tempts men to want to have intercourse with you.” I was only to wear skirts or dresses, otherwise I would be disobeying God’s desire for women to be modest. Not wanting to defy God or—gulp—get raped, I did as I was told, but this new rule presented some difficulties.”
― Rachel Dolezal, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World