What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker Quotes

“It’s just too fucking much to always have to be angry and alert. To always have to be ready and willing to challenge whiteness. To always have a perfectly pithy tweet or a thousand-word screed ready in response to the next Trayvon Martin, the newest Sandra Bland, and the latest Eric Garner, and to feel all the same feelings again. And again. And again. I just wanted a fucking break.”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

“I think about how she just gave gave gave gave gave gave gave because life took took took took took took took. I think about how I took took took took took from her. [...] I think about how black women are socialized to be enduring and steadfast and forgiving and giving giving giving so much that there's nothing left of them but dust. I think about how this dynamic exists both within America's general white dominating culture and in black American culture.”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays

“If you're just black, America adds a decade of age, a vat of sass, and a coating of Kevlar to your skin because of course niggers don't feel any pain. If you're poor and black, America acts like you emerge from the womb twenty-seven years old, with four kids, five predicate felonies, and a lit Newport already between your lips. White people get to be babies. And they still get to be babies when they're adults.”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays

“I was Pittsburgh Young, Black, and Successful. Pittsburgh Young, Black, and Successful meant Friday evenings downstairs at Savoy in the Strip District, and perhaps a table upstairs if it was your birthday. It meant Alpha and Que boat rides, NEED Scholarship dinners, and Ronald H. Brown Leadership Awards galas. It meant a stint on the Urban League Young Professionals executive board. It meant brunches at the LeMont on Mother’s Day and the Grand Concourse when you wanted to stunt. It meant frequent pictures in the Post-Gazette and the City Paper”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

“But decent was (and is) a baseline. Decent was (and is) the threshold. Decent was (and is) a standard WordPress template. Decent was (and is) a practiced and careful passivity. You are decent, not because you do things that actually matter and actually help, but because you don’t do shit. Decent ain’t shit, really. Fuck decent. What mattered and still matters most is being worthy.”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

“And conspiracy theories about everything from AIDS (created by the government to stop African birthrates) and Magic Johnson (rid of HIV after he purchased the cure from the government) to Timberlands (the tree logo etched on every pair represented the lynching of black people) and Tommy Hilfiger (went on Oprah to explain why he didn’t want black people wearing his clothes) were considered verifiable facts.”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

“She shares my general philosophy about white people, which exists as a repetitious vacillation between bemusement, annoyance, fury, and pity, and is a vital core value for any appropriately aware black person to possess. Admittedly, this sounds quite a bit like racism. And perhaps it would be, if black people could be racist toward whites. (We can’t, btw. We can be prejudiced, but actual racism is bias plus power. The only “reverse racism” is when white people wear Confederate flag snapbacks backward.)”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

“It stems from a detonative and byzantine word; one invented by racists to subjugate and antagonize the people they decided to deem “black,” cultivated by descendants of those racists to continue that legacy of fulmination and intimidation and hate, and existing today and in perpetuity as both a relic of that era and a reminder of the boundlessness of said era.”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

“For many black American families, the dogged and grim pursuit of upward mobility—of the American dream being actualized instead of aspirational—cultivates a dynamic where performative mobility replaces actual mobility. This, of course, is a by-product of the historical constrictions and conditions placed on our financial ascension. Moving up the ladder from working poor to lower middle class, from lower middle class to middle class, and from middle class to upper middle class is possible. And it happens often enough that actively pursuing it can’t be dismissed as silly.”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

“We scattered like Skittles dropped in a sink;”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

“I grew increasingly frustrated that Tracey possessed, well, agency. And was able to decide, for whatever reason, that while she adored me, those feelings would remain platonic. She wanted no part of my fantasy.”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

“Whiteness in America exists and thrives in that just another space, where things will always be fine. Things will always be all right. Things will always work out. And then I wondered (again) if I should even be there. And if, by being there, I was choosing sanity over integrity. Sanity or integrity? That's such a fucked-up question to ask someone and to require someone to answer. Such a fucked-up circumstance to even allow such a fucked-up question to exist.”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays

“It must be nice, I thought while stretching my hamstrings underneath the east wall backboard. To be able to exist here without ever questioning your existence here.”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays

“Conversations about politics are infrequent. [...] But they happen enough for me to know just how much of an outsider I am there-- how different my world is from theirs, and how my world exists within theirs-- and how this outsider status extends through the door to Paul's office; past the visitor lockers, urinals, and showers in the hallway leading to the gym's main entry; into the just-recemented parking lot; onto both the Fifth Avenue exit wrapped around the school's entrance and the Neville Street exit parked behind the gym; and wherever either of those paths take me. There is nowhere in America I can drive, walk, shit, write, scream, sleep, fuck, eat, sweat, lie, spit, die, conjure, see, touch, sit, dream, drink, run, jump, dunk, dribble, shoot, pass, steal, guard, catch, screen, block, lob, assist or win without a similar sense of estrangement.”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays

“But I also remember that [my dad] was so available to me because, during this time, he wasn't working. This Dad-specific nostalgia might not exist the same way without the bricks laid by Mom.
I do not know how I should feel about Dad. I do not know how I should feel about myself.”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays

“When drunk, I usually eat how rabbits fuck-- angry, sweaty, and looking over my shoulder for falcons.”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays

“Most of the men in that room, when in mixed or polite company, referred to black women as sistas. Sometimes even queens. But we were only familial and revering when it was advantageous to be so. When 'sista' made sistas think of us as good brothas. [...] When sistas weren't around, however, and that performative loyalty and veneration was no longer immediately beneficial, our allegiance was to this down-ass white boy. Who, although a white man, was still a man. [His] use of 'nigga' offended our sensibilites. His facile misogyny matched them.”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays

“If you maybe wanted to be seen as so straight, so manly, so masculine that your heterosexuality was too pure to risk a homosexual contagion, you performed hatred, adopting a rigid and unceasing animus toward gay men that you didn't quite understand or maybe didn't even really believe. But you did it because other people did it and told you that you were supposed to do it and that company was safer than what you feared might have happened if you maybe just admitted that you didn't know why you were supposed to care about how men who didn't appear to be straight walked and talked. And that you didn't know why you were supposed to care about appearing to be straight.”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays

“I thought [...] of all the negotiating and navigating it requires to exist while black and relatively sane. And how, for the rest of them, for my [white] teammates and the [white] guys we just played against and the [white] guys waiting to play next game, this was just another game. Just another week. Just another day. Just another election. Just another president. Just another Thursday. Whiteness in America exists and thrives in that _just another_ space, where things will always be fine. Things will always be all right. Things will always work out. (p. 288)”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays

“White privilege--the idea that whiteness, for white Americans, provides an imperishable benefit of the doubt and a flexible and perpetually renewable get-out-of-jail-free card-- is often dismissed by critics and even spoken of by believers in it as an abstract and academic term with no basis of reality. But it doesn't exist without the cultural, social, political, and legal reinforcement that white people's feelings, thoughts, desires, and opinions matter more than the feelings, thoughts, desires, and opinions of non-white people (black people, specifically). It's not so much that blacks are thought to be subhuman--although that belief festers too. It's that the humanity of whites is the only humanity that matters. Their humanity is the standard all other humanities are judged by. This ceaseless homage toward whiteness also affects how physical pain and discomfort are assessed and treated. (p. 243)”
― Damon Young, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays