The Quaking of America Quotes

“Find and stand with other bodies who care about liberation, justice, and an emancipated democracy.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“Healing is a reminder of what we already are and what we have always been part of.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“Many of these bills proposed limiting or eliminating mail-in ballots, drive-up voting, 24/7 voting, and/or early voting.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“Meanwhile, to rally and organize its followers, and to recruit new ones, the Republican Party has been using techniques perfected by the Ku Klux Klan and, later, the German and American Nazi Parties and the South African apartheid government.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“The party took a firm, clear stand against the right to vote, the validity of election results, the peaceful and orderly transfer of power, racial justice and equity, the accountability of its leaders, the very process of governance, and truth itself.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“Paul Gosar killed his colleague in a cartoon. Kevin McCarthy is killing democracy in real life. Matt Gaetz says he might offer Kyle Rittenhouse a job as a congressional intern as jury debates the teen’s case. The Republican effort to govern by threat. Insurrectionists are finally receiving justice. But the GOP is more unhinged than ever. Trust is a key ingredient in “functional institutions”—and Congress is fresh out of it. Man who raped four teenagers gets no jail time; judge says “Incarceration isn’t appropriate.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“If millions of us do this, the shifts in our bodies can shift our culture, our country, and the trajectory of history.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“It’s about preparing your body and community for a civil war—and, if possible, preventing it. It’s also about leaning into our racial reckoning and beginning to create a living, embodied antiracist culture.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“At the same time, America is roiling and reverberating with a long-overdue racial reckoning. This reckoning began soon after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, and it continues to unfold.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“After you read each quote, pause briefly. Take note of what emerges in your body.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“Two, they’ve doubled down on the idea that violence is a perfectly acceptable means to take power. Three, they’ve decided that the next election will be one where democracy itself is something to attack and beat. Umair Haque”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“For the first time since 1860, a major American political party doesn’t believe America is a democracy. No Republican will win a contested primary in 2022 or 2024 who will assert that Biden is a legal president. The effect of this is profound and difficult to predict. But millions of Americans believe the American experiment is ending. Stuart Stevens”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“To repel this assault, we must organize, based on our personal and communal interests, vote in every general election and every primary, and hold those in elected office accountable.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“If you compromise at the expense of bodies of culture, particularly Black and Indigenous bodies, as you have so many times before, you will accelerate our country’s destruction.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“It is little wonder that about two-fifths of Republicans (in a poll this year) expressed an openness to political violence, under certain circumstances. People in this group are not being stigmatized. They have the effective, endorsement of a former president and likely GOP presidential nominee in 2024. Michael Gerson in the Washington Post, September 27, 2021”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“Everything the GOP will do—and, as I write this, is currently doing—in the name of “election integrity” is clearly intended to undermine election integrity and voter confidence.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“The Republicans at the state and local level are way, way more gone than the Republicans in Washington.… So you’re going to get a far larger number of wackadoodle Republicans elected to Congress in 2022 because they will reflect the craziness that’s going on state and locally right now.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“Arizona state representative Shawnna Bolick proposed a law that would empower the Arizona legislature (currently controlled by the GOP) to overrule the certification of popular vote results by the state’s own secretary of state. The state of Georgia has done something similar, enacting a new voting law that strips power from state and local elections officials and gives it to the state legislature (which is currently Republican).”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“We’re taking over school boards, we’re taking over the Republican Party through the precinct committee strategy. We’re taking over all the elections. Suck on this!”)”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“Joanna Lydgate, the CEO of the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center, sounded an even louder alarm: “Having election deniers run elections is like having arsonists take over the fire department.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“This is a great big flashing red warning sign. The officials who fulfilled their legal duty after the last election are now being replaced by people who are pledging to throw a wrench in the gears of the next election. It tells you that they are planning nothing but chaos and that they have a strategy to disrupt the certification of the next election.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“In another, parallel GOP initiative, beginning in the summer of 2021—in thousands of towns, cities, counties, and states—huge numbers of pro-authoritarian, pro-Trump, anti-democracy GOP supporters signed up to become election monitors, precinct officers, and poll workers.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning

“Some proposed laws politicized the oversight of elections by giving state legislatures, secretaries of state, or election boards the ability to arbitrarily overturn legitimate election results. Many of these laws passed in states where the Republican Party controlled both the legislature and the governorship. By the end of 2021, at least nineteen states passed legislation that made it harder to vote.”
― Resmaa Menakem, The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning