Quinn > Recent Status Updates

“That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head of the table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.”

“But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by.”

“Sometimes substituting race for gender also is an interesting exercise.....”

“Esfand, the first woman in the Iranian cabinet, had been wrapped in a sack and machine-gunned for the crimes of “corruption on earth, expansion of prostitution and warring against God.” What she had done was direct schoolgirls not to veil and order textbooks that presented a more modern vision of women.”

Nelson Mandela once said “If you talk to a man in a language he understand that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language that goes to his heart.” He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, “I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being.”

“You’ve got two options in that situation. You take the retail job, flip burgers at McDonald’s, if you’re one of the lucky few who even gets that much. The other option is to toughen up, put up this facade. You can’t leave the hood, so you survive by the rules of the hood.”

“In society, we do horrible things to one another Bc we don’t see the person it affects. We don’t see their face. We don’t see them as people. Which was the whole reason the hood was built in the first place, to keep the victims of apartheid out of sight and out of mins. Because if white people ever saw black people as human, they would see that slavery is unconscionable.”

“The hood made me realize that crime succeeds because crime does the one thing the government doesn’t do: crime cares. Crime is grassroots. Crime looks for the young kids who need support and a lifting hand. Crime offers internship programs and summer jobs and opportunities for advancement. Crime gets involved in the community. Crime doesn’t discriminate.”

People lecture the poor: “take responsibility for yourself! Make something of yourself!” But with what raw materials are the poor to make something of themselves? People love to say “Give a man a fish & he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish & he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing.

“I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn’t true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I’ve felt about relationships for the rest of my life: you do not own the thing you love. I was lucky to learn that lesson at such a young age.”

“Neighbors and relatives used to pester my mom. “Why do all this? Why show him the world when he’s never going to leave the ghetto?” “Because,” she would say, “even if he never leaves the ghetto, he will know that the ghetto is not the world. If that is all I accomplish, I’ve done enough.”

“If my mother had one goal, it was to free my mind. My mother spoke to me like an adult... Adults supervise you, but they don’t get down on your level & talk to you. My mom did. All the time. She was always telling me stories, giving me lessons. “What does the passage mean? What does it mean to you? How do you apply it to your life?” ...My mom did what school didn’t. She taught me how to think.”

“We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.”

“My own family basically did what the American justice system does: I was given more lenient treatment than the black kids.... Growing up the way I did, I learned how easy it is for white people to get comfortable with a system that awards them all the perks.”

“You are never more yourself than when you’re taking a shit.”

“In America you had the forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid.”

“For a long time I didn’t understand why so many black people had abandoned their indigenous faith for Christianity. But the more we went to church.. the more I learned how Christianity works: if ur Native American & u pray to the wolves ur a savage. If ur African & u pray to ur ancestors ur a primitive. But when white ppl pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well that’s just common sense.”

“I saw that what divides me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do.”