Brown Girls Quotes

“Never in a million years would we have the courage to move to a foreign country on a dream, become fluent in a strange language, raise families on foreign soil, far from those we love. Raise children who often feel like reflections in foggy mirrors. Who, from the moment they learn to walk, are running farther than they can see.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“They ask questions about the wall the current U.S. president wants to build, and is it true that Muslims are barred from entering the country, and what about the caravan of refugees fleeing gang violence at the border? We discuss all the ways the Land of the Free, under the present administration, currently “welcomes” its newcomers.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“Still, we force ourselves to laugh along with them, knowing our families have cleaned their apartments, picked up their dogs’ shit, raised them and all their siblings.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“You shall not be an ugly girl. Do not spend hours in the sun, lest your already dark skin grows darker. Be a Lady, with a pretty smile and a pretty face. Look how your hair is limp and dry, your lips chapped, like a ghost! Look at your lipstick with its too-bright shade, how your purse is ratty and frayed. Change your sinful ways and make them pleasing unto me, says the Lord your Mother.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“Thank you for colonizing our ancestors’ countries, for the wars and dictators! We are so thankful for your civilizing religion and visas! Oh thank you, thank you, thank you.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“We steal a permanent marker, scrawl STOOPID on their classroom doors, above posters that read Knowledge. Wisdom. Discipline. From the corner of our eyes, we study each other while we hold our Styrofoam lunch trays, wait on bus stops, and stretch in gym class, our sneakers skidding against scuffed floors. Think: Her body is not mine is not mine is not mine. And yet.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“We laugh at our teachers, though our eyes tighten. Our classmates roar with glee at their errors and purposely call us the wrong names for the rest of the week, too. They call us Khadija, Akanksha, Maribeth, Ximena, Breonna, Cherelle, Thanh, Yoon, Ellen. They call us Josie, Rukhsana, Sonia, Odalis, Annabel, Kyra, Jenny, Cindy, Esther. During lunchtime, we call our teachers different names, too: dumbass, idiot, old-lady bitch.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“Anjali is Guyanese, and her braid looks like a thick rope that lays heavy against her back, curly baby hairs tamed by coconut oil. Michaela is Haitian and likes to mimic her parents’ French accents on the school bus (Take zee twash out! she says, as we clutch our sides in laughter), and Naz’s family is from the Ivory Coast—I mean, we’re practically cousins, she says to Michaela. Our teachers snap at Sophie to STOP TALKING NOW, but call her Mae’s name. Sophie, who is Filipino, clamps a hand over her big-ass mouth, which is never closed—she loves to gossip and flirt with the boys we call “Spanish”—while Mae, who is Chinese and polite to teachers, at least to their faces, jolts from the bookshelf where she’s stealthily shuffling novels from their alphabetical spots, in order to disrupt our English class two periods later.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“OUR TEACHERS CALL ON NADIRA but stare at Anjali. Our teachers tell Michaela to Come to the board and answer number three and make sure you show your work, please, even though they hand the whiteboard marker to Naz. We stand when our names are called, and our teachers halt, confused. Oh, I’m sorry, I— No, not you, I didn’t mean you, I— Across the classroom, we catch each other’s gazes. Nadira is Pakistani and wears a headscarf, which drapes elegantly beneath her neck, except for when she’s playing handball and she knots the fabric, tight, under her chin.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“We begin to paint our faces lighter, lighter. Until we are the color of lilies. Or bones. There. Beautiful.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“When our mothers visit American supermarkets for the first time, we watch as they marvel at aisles of gleaming food, seemingly magical in their limitlessness. Pineapples all year round?! (Because what is more American than excess, than not being subject to - than being above - the laws of nature, the changing seasons?)”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“Already, men scheme for new lands beyond our planet, surfaces and moons to mine and profit from, to colonize and populate without a single glance at the place they’ve left burning. Earth, an abandoned mother”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“This time around, however, we find that we aren't repelled by the noise, the chaos, in the way we once were. The dregs of Queens, this place we so desperately dreamt of leaving. But who would've thought we'd long to return?”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“privilege, white supremacy—history, for that matter. We don’t have to say: Just because you haven’t experienced it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. When we are with them, it all goes without saying. Brown and brown means,”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“At night, we don’t expect the women dressed in miniskirts and stilettos loitering on corners, who share our complexion and hair color and build. Women who could be our sisters, but aren’t, who enter cars driven by men who are, more often than not, male tourists”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“mortgages, don’t give a flying fuck that their dads have lost their jobs and haven’t been able to find new ones. They don’t buy groceries, they don’t drive their grandmothers to physical therapy. They don’t remember the sound of their mother’s voice after a shift at the hospital when she says, I’m so tired. They aren’t fazed when we mention our worries at the sight of more MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN signs populating the streets where we grew up. Instead, they stifle a yawn and say, Well. All we can do is move forward.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“their breakups, their layoffs, their families, or anything of importance until we prod them.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“We’ve grown tired of Manhattan’s “glamour,” which, like the knockoff Coach bags sold on Canal Street and the Botoxed faces on the Upper East Side, is, in reality, fake as hell.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“We force ourselves to believe that these boys are beneath us, despite the fact that the difference between our skin tones is but a few shades.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“Lunches provided by New York City via the U.S. government, the same meals that prison inmates eat—that’s what our Social Studies teacher Mr. DiMarco told us.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“We sing Mariah, Whitney, Destiny’s Child, our voices straining for the same notes as these brown singers.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“We know how to cram into our parents’ beds when loved ones from distant lands and warm climates immigrate to the States with their suitcases and dreams and empty wallets. Stay for months, years.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls

“Color of the charcoal pencils our sisters use to rim their eyes. Color of grilled hamburger patties. Color of our mother’s darkest thread, which she loops through the needle.”
― Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls