Our Hidden Conversations Quotes

“Beauty standards are something different altogether - the product of a capitalist, colonialist system that through laws, customs, messaging and media portrayals created a metric meant to elevate some by ensuring a large group of outsiders were held at a lower rung.”
― Michele Norris, Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity

“Beauty is given upon birth to all who walk this Earth like a gift that can be nurtured, embraced, or cherished just as easily as it can be twisted, extinguished, or denied by forces that believe they wield the power to police someone's worth.”
― Michele Norris, Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity

“The word Minnesota comes from a Dakota phrase meaning “sky-tinted water” or “land where the water is so clear it reflects the sky.” So yes, the state—my beloved home state—takes its name from the language of Indigenous people whom it forcibly removed from the land. Take a moment to take that in.”
― Michele Norris, Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity

“Racism is a shape-shifter. It is not the same thing today as it was yesterday, and it will not be the same tomorrow or ten years from now. That’s shorthand for the academic definition that describes racism as a ‘multi-dimensional , highly adaptive system that ensures unequal power and distribution of resources among racial groups.’ The group that controls he levers of paw and distribution of resources weaves the interests into the gears of that system.”
― Michele Norris, Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity