My Time Among the Whites Quotes

“Losing privilege can feel a lot like inequality. If something feels unfair to you as a white person, it's likely that equality is actually being achieved in that moment.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education

“I've come to see the American Dream for what it really is: a lie my parents had little choice but to buy into and sell to me, a lie that conflated working hard with passing for, becoming, and being white.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education

“What I still find remarkable is that a decision I made at seventeen, with very little information or guidance, has gone on to shape my entire life. Maybe this feels remarkable to me because it’s a lasting characteristic of the first-ten college student identity, which can carry with it the knowledge of a shadow life, one where you’re equally happy having done something or gone somewhere else. Or maybe the decision still feels astonishing to me because I initially chose to attend a completely different u university, its two biggest draws being that it was essentially free and that my best friend would be there—two reasons that seemed good to me and to my family, in part because none of us knew what we could or should expect from the college experience. Perhaps what needs the most consideration when college commitments are being made is not which college, but what you feel you need fro a school, and that’s a tricky set of qualities to recognize (and an even trickier thing to trust) when you’re the first in your family to set off down that path.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education

“A promise is not the same as a guarantee, but we couldn’t tell the difference yet.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education

“What a waste of all that metal, that pain, and that work. With that gift came the commitment to honor and maintain it, and perhaps because I was the first in my family to have such a gift, I didn’t know that things never stop shifting, that getting the chance at something better doesn’t automatically guarantee it.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education

“I read her the topics slowly, pausing after each sentence, waiting for her to say something, just an mmhmm or the conversational throw-me-a-bone of okay. The first topic was two paragraphs long. I remember it had the word ivtersectionalities in it. And the word gendered. I waited for her response and for the ways it would encourage me, tor her to tell me I could do this, but I knew from my mother’s total silence that, like me, she’d never before heard these words: my first insight into how accessible to certain vocabularies was a kind of privilege.

Of course, I didn’t know to call this privilege, not yet. “You’re right,” my mother said after a moment. “You’re screwed.”
― Jennine Capo Crucet, My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education