White Negroes Quotes

“America fears anger from black people, has always feared anger from black people, considers black people angry even when something more like “despaired” or “fatigued” better suits the mood.”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“It feels bad to wade in the repercussions of our behavior, it feels good to apologize and disavow and consider oneself exempt moving forward. But being online, being white, being online as a white person, means never being exempt. Antiracist as a noun does not exist. There's only people doing the work, or not. The person genuinely invested in the work doesn't run from discomfort but accepts it as the price of personhood taken for granted.”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue... and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“Binding the disparate cultural touchstones in this book, appropriation runs on desire more than hatred, inattention more than intention.”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“In the new millennium, there is All Lives Matter and the more absurd Blue Lives Matter, anti-black counter-slogans that nonetheless cannot escape the rhetorical world black people made. Indeed, as scholars P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods have observed, “The meme has become a political Rorschach producing a cornucopia of identitarian hashtags . . . that, at the end of the day, effortlessly obscures or subsumes blackness’s grammar of suffering.”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“Black enterprise does not go unpunished if unaffiliated with white profits. Whiteness will gleefully disturb black neighborhoods, black accolades, black centers, black classrooms, black archives, and black methods. If not allowed to join in—that is, if prevented from profiting from the goings-on—well, the whole thing might as well go up in flames.†”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“Newspapers and magazines only, and still reluctantly, cover black death when the buzz borders on frenzy—not because it happened but because it went viral. The media sits and waits for a name to trend that doesn’t belong to a (yet) public figure. Then they make them public. They trot out their Negro writer du jour and the Negro writer produces an aching tribute to being black in America. And another. And another. Et cetera.”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“Black speech cannot sooth the broken white soul. Only revolution can do that.”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“The hipster seeks out “the Negro” because from who better to learn the transitive properties of living than the community who could never take life for granted?”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“Cultural theft is only the symptom, the readily identifiable mark of whiteness in crisis.”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“The appropriation of black language cannot be stopped, except only if we were to leave for Mars and never come back. At issue isn’t the transmission, but the vacuous want behind it—as if black culture lives to rescue mass culture from boredom.”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“The innocence reserved for white women alone becomes the source of crisis in their adolescence. Their identity formed out of the residue of everyone else’s stereotype, white women never truly grow up in the eyes of the world.”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“As Baraka knew, black American life is movement, a living verb: we swing, we get hip, we real cool we. The white American, meanwhile, stands close by and observes—ready to transform life into style and profit, a process Baraka calls “the cultural lag.”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“There is time enough, but none to spare.”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“Everyone should feel uncomfortable with how white America is setting up generational wealth off of weed when so many Black and Latino men have been incarcerated and lost their livelihood over the same thing”—”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“The only way for black and brown small business people to enter is if you can partner with a large funded white business,”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“But where a black dollar can be made, white violence follows.”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

“America is addicted to hurting black people. America is addicted to watching itself hurt black people. The internet didn’t invent this kind of spectacle, nor is it the source of the disease, but rather collaborates with the country’s disregard for the black lives without which it wouldn’t exist. Black people taught the internet how to go viral. But when virality became enterprise, black people were seldom to be found.”
― Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation