Afropean Quotes

“For most black people in Europe, the battle against prejudice is for life, which is why you have to pace yourself to run a marathon instead of exerting all your energy in a spring if you want to survive — you can’t be throwing beer bottles at police and telling them to fuck themselves simply for the fun of it.”
― Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe

“Those unemployed black men I saw loitering all over Europe weren’t inherently lazy, but lost and low on confidence and opportunities, and their crime was that they were visible, unlike the black staff who cleaned the station and whose hard work had rendered them invisible.”
― Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe

“When I rebelled, even here in the ‘enlightened’ twenty-first century, I was lumbered with with the feeling that I was rebelling on the behalf on an entire people, and when I refrained from rebelling it was to challenge the opinion that I was proof of a black problem; acts of resistance considered fair game when enacted by white people assume a dangerous radical hue in the eyes of Western society when carried out by blacks. In essence, I wasn’t comfortable enough in my own skin in this Antifa stuff, partly because I felt the colour of that skin carried its own surplus surreality in the surroundings i grew up in; I could be wearing an Oxford shirt and chinos and driving a Toyota Prius, and still be enough of an outsider.”
― Johny Pitts