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“But somewhere along the way various political actors had seized on the new currents of thinking and had done everything in their to ensure that people heard the "you're racist" without hearing "and it's not your fault." ”

“Kendi said he had anticipated this potential resistance when writing How to Be an Antiracist. That is why the book leans so heavily on how its author, a Black man, himself once trafficked in anti-Black ideas and narratives...."I wrote it that way because the heartbeat of racism is just denial, constant denial." ”

“The difference, Kendi said, is that people generally trust the medical system. "Within the context of race and racism," he said, "you have so many racist propagandists who are constantly telling white Americans particularly that when people diagnose you as racist, they're trying to hurt you and attack you. They're constantly being told that..." ”

“The doctor wasn't trying to alienate him...but the news felt... like an attack. "I have no risk factors," he said. "Which is precisely what some of these liberal Democrats say on race: 'I have no risk factors. I'm liberal. I have friends that are Black. I'm this, I'm that. My child is a child of color.' It's the same sort of thing. I have no risk factors, so how could you say that I have this serious illness?" ”

“"Adele called herself a racist, not you," Erica said. "But if you say, 'I'm a recovering racist,' then are you implying that because we don't know what we don't know..." Adele tried to appease her. For years, she had been using this language of "recovering racist." But recently she had taken to saying "I'm recovering from racism," recovering from a system that ensnared her. ”

“It was important, according to Adele, to hold two rival truths in one's head: "I did not create this system," and "I'm responsible, moving forward, for the way in which I show up and the impact that I can make." It wasn't enough to be against the idea of racism, because the system you were caught up in was racist. You had to be actively devoted to purging racism from your system to be an antiracist.”

“Erica noted that white people often rebutted the charge of racism by invoking their personal goodness. But it is possible to be a good person and racist, Adele argued. "We can consciously say we're a good person and have been working on these things, and that does not always mean on our subconscious level that we are not holding beliefs that have been programmed into us," she said.”

“a way to be both more sweeping—all white people are racist because they have been raised in a racist paradigm—while toning down the charge, because racism wasn't a choice; it was the air we breathe in the United States of America. I'm not racist. The atmosphere is racist. Racism in this account became more ubiquitous, more unshakable, but less malicious. It wasn't a sin. It was a culture, a structure, a regime.”

“Adele added another idea to the mix, to make the callout more of a call in...She told the parents thoughts lead to feelings, which lead to actions, which lead to results... "The thoughts are happening in the mind, and the feelings are happening in the body," Adele said. Our subconscious thoughts form our "paradigm." And it is really our paradigm that is racist.”

“Adele was offering the parents a definition of racism that was on the rise in the culture but might have struck many of them as provocative: racism is a system that ensnares everyone in the society, more than just an individual act that takes place at a discrete moment. And a corollary: it is impossible to be free from racism if you are white, socialized by this society.”

“Kurt's initial reaction was avoidance. To acknowledge all that he had not seen before was to surrender the right to look away, and in those first years Kurt didn't feel he had space to add the pursuit of racial justice to his plate. "It was like, wait a second, I haven't done anything wrong. I've worked hard, I've done stuff. I want to keep doing that for my family..." ”

“I always felt like I just worked really hard to get where I'm at. “So it's hard for me to accept that, yeah, I worked hard, but I was also "advantaged." It was "just a shock," he said. He felt he had lost an idea of himself. He had thought he was what he was now realizing he wasn't: a self-made man, a product of merit, not a man given a leg up. "I went from oblivious to denial to a little bit of shame and guilt"...”

“It was a challenge he and his wife thought about often, he said. He put it this way: "We're woke. How do we wake them up without going too fast?" What he meant was that he saw some risk in him and his wife changing too quickly, drinking camp Kool-Aid, acquiring the new antiracist terms, and then being so far ahead of everyone in their community not in their situation that the gulf became too forbidding to cross.”

“ "Just because I don't like it, and I realize how unhealthy and dysfunctional it is, when everything around me is about white privilege, where do I go?" he asked. He agreed that everything needed to change, but he had grown fatalistic about his ability to be part of that change. The pain Freddy felt in "swimming in an ocean of privilege," as he put it, had come to be its own avenue of evasion.”

“...Barbara claimed to believe white supremacy had to be broken down if children like hers, and the country itself, were to thrive. But she had strong feelings about how this change should occur, how it should address her, how it should bring her along... she knew that letting white wariness set the rate of racial progress is precisely what had kept things the way they were for so long.”

“In their own ways, Linda Sarsour, Loretta Ross, and Alicia Garza had spoken of where white America fit into their visions of change. As activists, they sought more than attitude shifts; they worked toward new laws, structures, material conditions. But they had no choice but to think and strategize about resistance their movements met from white Americans wary of the future they sought...”

“Erica: "A comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing ever grows there, right? So it is going to be uncomfortable and it is going to be hard, and you can't quit because it got hard." Discomfort was vital to their persuasive method.”

“"The right deeply understands people. It gives them a reason for being...it gives them answers...the left, we think a lot about facts and figures and logic that we hope will change people's minds. I think what's real is actually much closer to Black feminist thinkers who have said things like 'People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel' " ”

“Even when the movement left did engage with electoral politics and pursue this kind of power, Garza said, it often fell short of the right at a crucial element of persuasion-giving citizens more than arguments from reason, providing a kind of emotional shelter. "People want to find a place that they call home," she told me, "Home for a lot of people means a place where you can feel safe...where someone is caring...”

“Tempering language to be understood mattered especially in the electoral context...with...the aversion many of her allies had to working inside the electoral process. She wanted to hold on to some of that rebellious spirit and iconoclasm, even as she would tell anyone who listened that elective politics is where the power is, and if you're not there, you're not building durable power.”

“"The term 'white supremacy' is much more mainstream now than it ever was in my lifetime," she said. "And that doesn't mean people know what it means..." ... The practical question is whether you use a term like that with less politically conscious audiences. Is it worth the risk? And here Garza made a distinction: do change your language for comprehension, but don't change it merely for comfort.”

“"An organizer builds a base and understands that in building that base, you're actually bringing together people who may agree on one thing, but they might not agree on a lot of things. Your job is to figure out how to keep those people woven together in order to accomplish a goal. Part of that weaving is making space for the waking among the woke. That's important. That's actually, I think, the locus of change."”

“ "As an organizer, you know that your role is to recruit people who may be looking for you, but they don't know it. You become a bridge for people who want to be a part of making change but don't know where to start, don't know how to do it. And they carry with them the problematic ideas that you're trying to change." Their problematic ideas are the whole point.”

“ "The more that we root in relationship, the more that we realize that our ideas about how the world works get shattered by the humanity of people," she [Garza] said. "That is a fundamental tenet of organizing, and it's a fundamental tenet of how we find room for the waking among the woke." ”

“The organizer's task was to resist the temptation to dismiss the woman, and instead to walk with her and cultivate her dissonance as grist for the persuasive mill. But the progress that occurred in the story was only possible through sustained organizing anchored in community. Garza first built a relationship strong enough to withstand her mining of the woman's dissonance and her attempt to reconcile it.”

“"The only way you get people to a different place is by walking with them," Garza said. "I have never seen an instance where, because somebody was deeply shamed or called names or ignored, they changed their mind. I just haven't. I haven't seen that in my own life, and I certainly haven't seen it in organizing. There is often just a lack of understanding of the methods needed to create change."”

“"Everybody who develops a consciousness or a passion about something starts off at a place where they don't know. They don't know what they don't know. It's through the process of being engaged, being educated, being debated or even just having compassion for somebody's perspective. that's the process that people go through in order to get to a particular place."”

“"Critique is important," she went on. "It can make us sharper. It can make us more effective and better. But criticism is also a skill. It's not just about throwing out the first thing that makes you mad or that you thought about in your mind. It requires skills. The skill to boil it down to the essence and not make shit personal. The ability to make room for growth and assume that growth is possible..."”

“Garza said, there was a place for internal criticism in the movement. But, she said, "it works best in the context of an organization where there's shared values and relationships and accountability. And that's not what social media offers." Somehow the culture of taking someone aside or getting on the phone to deal with a minor disagreement had faded, and the reaction expected of people was a public callout...”

“Progressives, Garza said, too often seek out united fronts when, in fact, they should be forging popular fronts. Drawing on Marx, she defines popular fronts as "alliances that come together across a range of political beliefs, for the purpose of achieving a short- to intermediate- term goal, while united fronts are long-term alliances based on the highest level of political alignment" ”