Some of My Best Friends Quotes

“Being trained to think like a lawyer in class, or act like a lawyer at dinner, was a constant reminder that the train chugging steadily toward enlightenment was rolling over piles of bodies. Obviously, it doesn’t read that way to every farm boy, but to me, there was something instructive in getting the regular memo. It’s part of why I left the law, albeit a relatively small part. More meaningfully, it clarified all the times I’d been pulled into a room to talk about diversity as both physician and cure, and it shaped my attitude toward all the rooms yet to come: the institution is not your home, it does not care about you, and it is not your job to fix it. To some people this will sound obvious; to others, harsh. But I wasn’t born knowing it and I still find value in saying it, especially during a time when, for a number of organizations, “fix us” has become item one on the agenda.”
― Tajja Isen, Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service

“In a classic Vice piece from 2017, writer Sarah Hagi describes her sense, “like a type of synaesthesia, but for race and cartoons,” that various anthropomorphic creatures are really and truly Black, even if they’re not explicitly drawn or even coded as such.”
― Tajja Isen, Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service