Black Boy Out of Time Quotes

“Something about how to let folks rest in peace, especially when their peace is different from mine. Louder than mine.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“Healing cannot come out of punishment because punishment’s only purpose is to create more harm.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“For empathy to be activated, a witness has to interpret someone else’s pain and see it as similar to their own. When Black pain not only is seen as dissimilar to the viewer but also gives them pleasure—when our bodies have been defined as inherently criminal—it’s no wonder that police body camera footage of an unarmed Black person being murdered so rarely leads to a conviction.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“for visibility to effectively improve the plight of marginalized people, empathy must be evoked, and this world is specifically designed not to empathize with Black people.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“How much could I blame myself for internalizing self-hatred while trying to find what about me was worth saving in an anti-Black, anti-queer world that hated me, too?”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“There is so much exhaustion in detailing what no one else is able to do while white people and their problems are attended to,”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“Black suffering for the sake of pious ideals never proved to be enough for divine intervention”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“have a boyfriend, I told her in my head, a small part of me hoping the pieces of her that had been passed down in the blood now rapidly carrying oxygen out of my brain might overhear. I would never tell Mother Bhūmi I was queer aloud. By then, I had imagined that she was sealed off by her own carceral ways of thinking—punitive ideas she heeded that encouraged harming those who did not fit this society’s norms around gender, even if they were family. It wasn’t that she couldn’t understand my queerness or love me if she knew, but I believed that the parts of her that would understand and love me were buried so deep beneath her own pain that they would take years to excavate. Years I knew she didn’t have. Years that had been stolen from her, just like my childhood had been pried away from me. How much could I blame her for what she replaced them with? How much could I blame myself for internalizing self-hatred while trying to find what about me was worth saving in an anti-Black, anti-queer world that hated me, too? How much could I blame Mata? And how much should I hold accountable the world that separated us from our childhoods in the first place and told us that blaming each other was all we could ever do about it? Was it my, my mother’s, or my grandmother’s fault that we were too fractured ourselves to hold every aspect of one another, or did the problem stem from an anti-Black society that wouldn’t allow any of us to exist as fully whole people within it?”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“Abolition doesn’t propose that once prisons are gone, all society’s ills will disappear. It proposes that illness is meant to be treated in the first place, not locked away.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“To truly care about murder and rape, I would also have to truly care about the conditions for murder and rape that are inherent to the way prisons have been designed.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“Am I taking this action against a perpetrator of harm to perpetrate more harm against them? Or will it truly help me (and/or others) not just to feel better momentarily but to carry less harm and hurt into the world? And what can I learn from my ancestors and other Indigenous people about healing without reinforcing carceral systems?”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“I was subjected to countless forms of abuse,” Eric tells me. “No one cared if I lived or died. There was brainwashing, turning siblings against siblings. I was very much alone, (literally) locked in a pitch-black dungeon, starving. I was just a kid . . . I was just a kid.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“situationship”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“I feel compelled to run from anything that doesn’t rest inside my comfort zone, or to prove that it does despite reality.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“It inherently creates one set of standards for people who can afford what it takes to avoid public scrutiny and another for those who can’t.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“El-Amin could only be a brute. That is the story that reaches the widest audience possible, and so that is the story that sells.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“People get too caught up in what they call god, and what he does or doesn’t look like, with too little concern for all that he does,” he rationalizes.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“the state hoarded resources to turn the white faces of the opioid crisis into sympathetic victims while it made out the Black faces of the crack epidemic to be monsters deserving of their lot.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“I had come to think of the tardiness of my peers and Black folks in general not only as inconvenient but as an indictment of their character.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“What’s the point of believing in anything if you don’t have doubts sometimes?”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“Most of them, in fact, serve to foster a kind of community, the kind that cheers on a person for acing tests that measure only how good they are at taking tests, not their intelligence; for having more of the skills others will celebrate than anyone else in the room, even if they don’t have more of the skills others will need;”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“All Black children are subjected to the harm that comes with erasing the complexity of their childhood experiences as they are forced into the categories of “young men” or “young women.” This expression of misafropedia also comes for our girl children, in how we project designations like “fast” onto those like Tierra.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“On the few, but still too frequent, occasions that I came home to that little yellow house to see one of my older siblings crying because one of his Black friends had been killed, I was always already armed with a plethora of reasons for why and how they might have deserved it by the time I reached my door. If I chose to bear those arms, I was also choosing to live in a specific version of the present defined by the state. I often did. I”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“To hear this white police officer tell his account of Brown’s murder, the young man was angry for no discernible reason, just as Roberto seemed to me in my recollections. Angry without cause. Beast, not boy. Bloodthirsty and devious. His violence was constructed as inevitable, regardless of whether it actually occurs. His violence was manufactured as perpetual, even when a pattern can’t be established. Because if you construct the story like that, then a Black child deserves whatever comes to them. Both Wilson and I were raised in the same America. The America that demonizes all Black children—and the Blackest of them will always be caught in the gun’s scope when you don’t question where you are pressured to point it.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“In this version of the story, other poor Black children were always a different type of poor from me.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“It’s almost impossible to feel excitement about anything when the threat of fatal disease is lurking around the corner.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“twenty-two-year-old Malaysia Goodson, a Black mother who, in January 2019, fell while trying to carry her stroller and baby down the subway stairs because there was no working elevator at her station and died (her official cause of death listed cardiac hypertrophy, which can lead to sudden death after physical stress, and hyperthyroidism as factors16).”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“There are doctors who disregard what we know about our bodies because they have anti-Black biases about what these bodies can do, deduce, and withstand. All of this is real—most of it I’ve experienced firsthand—and it leads to a logical aversion to medical professionals, particularly those whose effectiveness relies on how much they get to know you . . . which means it also relies on how vulnerable you allow yourself to be.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“After five hundred years of the atrocities of colonialism and no repair, there must be more to Black folks’ struggles than our own failures.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time

“misafropedia” to mean the anti-Black disdain for children and childhood that Black youth experience.”
― Hari Ziyad, Black Boy Out of Time