Thurma

“Discomfort, for more privileged sects, can be the threshold into increased awareness. It's the moments in which you shrink from that discomfort, that you don't walk through it, that you don't interrogate why you have such a corporal reaction to the demands of others, that those biases maintain their place.”
― Koa Beck, White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind

“In our streets, there is no snatching and grabbing in the name of dowry and such-like. People make do with what they have...

But among the more educated, nowadays, all this is changing. These people, for some reason, want to copy the upper castes. It's becoming a real problem having to make so many jewels for the bride and giving a lump sum worth so much, on top of that.

Such people can change themselves into a different caste only in these superficial matters, though. Because, whatever we do, whatever rituals we copy from other castes they, for their part, always rate us as beneath them. So what is the point of trying to copy them? Why should we lose all the better customs that are ours, and end up as neither one thing nor the other? It's like forgetting the butter in one's hand and going in search of ghee.”
― Bama, Sangati: Events

“Behaving like men or obtaining what men have or achieving parity with men was (and still is) not only shortsighted, it was deemed innately oppressive and therefore not in line with Black feminism. After all, the machinations that make what men have and how they historically operate—patriarchy—possible relies on the exploitation of others. The oversight of economic interests as the fundamental guiding principles of how our society has been constructed has had devastating historical consequences.”
― Koa Beck, White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind

“Contempt. Back in February, “herd immunity” had been a new concept for the people… A man called George. He was alerting the officer to the fact that he was about to die. You’d have to hate a man a lot to kneel on his neck till he dies in plain view of a crowd and a camera, knowing the consequences this would likely have upon your own life. (Or you’d have to be pretty certain of immunity from the herd—not an unsafe bet for a white police officer, historically, in America.) But this was something darker—deadlier. It was the virus, in its most lethal manifestation.”
― Zadie Smith, Intimations