Ryan

“Racial identity is willed or imposed, or both; it has no foundation outside of social experience. Nor, therefore, is racial ancestry or heritage a real thing other than through will or imposition. There are no racial imperatives that demand expression of particular attitudes, behavior, or social practices. Simply put, racial heritage cannot be denied or rejected because there's no such thing as racial heritage. In biological terms, saying "I am black" and "I am not black" are equally meaningless statements.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“As a result, many parents see behavior as the measure of who our kids are, rather than using behavior as a clue to what our kids might need.”
― Becky Kennedy, Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be

“This underscores the point that the core of the Jim Crow order was a class system rooted in employment and production relations that were imposed, stabilized, regulated, and naturalized through a regime of white supremacist law, practice, custom, rhetoric, and ideology. Defeating the white supremacist regime was a tremendous victory for social justice and egalitarian interests. At the same time, that victory left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms affirmed it. That is the source of that bizarre sensation I felt in the region a generation after the defeat of Jim Crow. The larger takeaway from this reality is that a simple racism/anti-racism framework isn’t adequate for making sense of the segregation era, and it certainly isn’t up to the task of interpreting what has succeeded it or challenging the forms of inequality and injustice that persist.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“Trump’s impulsive decision-making, distrust of experts, and embrace of conspiracy theories quickly stood as a testament to how far the pendulum had swung away from evidence-based reasoning and toward ignorance-driven populist rhetoric.”
― David Pakman, The Echo Machine: How Right-Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America