Mandi > Mandi's Quotes

“The concept of elite capture originated in the study of developing countries to describe the way socially advantaged people tend to gain control over financial benefits, especially foreign aid, meant for others.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“Ball adds that the “buying power” variant of this myth also serves to shift focus and blame onto the supposed “financial illiteracy” of the Black poor, as opposed to the social and economic conditions that exploit, oppress, and marginalize people.16”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“Elite capture happens when the advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the many toward their own narrower interests and aims.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“The World Bank and IMF continue to encourage post-colonial nations to maintain high levels of predatorily securitized debt today. By maintaining financial control, they operate as de facto governing bodies, tying needed aid to politically distorting conditions.33”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“Value capture is a process by which we begin with rich and subtle values, encounter simplified versions of them in the social wild, and revise our values in the direction of simplicity—thus rendering them inadequate.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“to be housed or not depends greatly on the rules and rule-like actions of a small group of elites: individual landlords, corporate landlords, the police, and the data agencies that traffic information between these groups.31 Elites have captured the means of maintaining shelter, so they set the rules by which the rest of us succeed or fail to win shelter.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“a wide range of activist groups, including the Debt Collective and the Movement for Black Lives, along with thinkers like Fantu Cheru and Jeffrey Williams, have long noticed the disciplinary function of student, medical, and credit card debt.56”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“Student debt alone in the United States is worth $1.7 trillion—which, the Debt Collective points out, turns into $1.7 trillion worth of leverage on the global financial system if it is tightly organized.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“constructive political culture would focus on outcome over process—the pursuit of specific goals or end results rather than avoiding complicity in injustice or promoting purely moral or aesthetic principles.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“This is just how life is supposed to be: terrible and brief and ending in—if you’re lucky—oblivion.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“Douglass is thus not a stock character called “slave,” but a human like us. To write like this, to imagine the enslaved, the colonized, the conquered as human beings has always been a political act. For Black writers it has been so often employed that it amounts to a tradition—one that I returned to that summer in Virginia with you.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“You cannot act upon what you cannot see. And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“We require another standard—one that sees the sharpening of our writing as the sharpening of our quality of light. And with that light we are charged with examining the stories we have been told, and how they undergird the politics we have accepted, and then telling new stories ourselves.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“The systems we oppose are systems of oppression, and thus inherently systems of cowardice. They work best in the dark, their essence tucked away and as unexamined as the great American pastime was once to me.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“I began to feel there was something deeply incurious in the approach of a man who insists on walking through the rooms of his childhood home to commune with ghosts, heedless of the people making their home there now.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“I think many of us who are teachers and professors have forgotten that the syllabus serves the student, and all around us are teachers, administrators, and columnists who seem to believe that material should be hard for the sake of it and that education itself is best when rendered not in wonder but in force.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“But if these writers, teachers, and administrators could part with the privilege of their own ignorance, they would see that they too need safe spaces—and that, for their own sakes, they have made a safe space of nearly the entire world.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“American history is filled with men and women who were as lethal as they were ridiculous.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“The danger we present, as writers, is not that we will simply convince their children of a different dogma but that we will convince them that they have the power to form their own.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“The late Jamal Khashoggi was fond of the Arabic proverb “Say your word, then leave.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“But virtues should be signaled, and the signalers should act to make their virtues manifest. It is the latter, not the former, that is the problem.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“In a place like this, your mind expands as the dark end of your imagination blooms, and you wonder if human depravity has any bottom at all, and if it does not, what hope is there for any of us?”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“In this way the want of relief can be permanently sated: Two thousand years of wrong has at last been righted, and a people, persecuted, hunted, and subjected to industrialized genocide, has not only survived but found its way back to a God-given home.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“The city’s most visible feature was its amazing variety of checkpoints—some of them were just soldiers lingering around, others massive gates with metal turnstiles. As we approached one, I watched two Palestinian schoolchildren being stopped by a soldier and directed back down the street from which they had come.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“But as in the Old City, Israeli soldiers exercised total control over all movement through the town.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“These soldiers roam as they feel, stopping and interrogating according to their whim. Later that day, I walked out to buy some goods from a shopkeeper. But before I could get there, a soldier walked out from a checkpoint, blocked my path, and asked me to state my religion. He looked at me skeptically when I told him I did not have one and asked for my parents’ religion. When I told him they were not religious either, he rolled his eyes and asked about my grandparents.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Again I felt the mental lens curving against the light and was reminded of something I have long known, something I’ve written and spoken about, but still was stunned to see here in such stark detail: that race is a species of power and nothing else.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Jewish Israelis in Jerusalem are citizens of the state; Palestinians in the city are merely “permanent residents,” a kind of sub-citizenship with a reduced set of rights and privileges. In Hebron, Jewish settlers are subject to civil law, with all its rights and protections, while stateless Palestinians in the same city are subject to military courts, with all their summary power and skepticism.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message