I Won't Shut Up Quotes

“As a self-proclaimed loud Black woman, I long for the day when my loudness doesn’t have to be armor that protects me from the fiery darts of white supremacy. I long to just be.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“Perhaps, Black freedom requires us to live in the holy tension of “now and not yet.” In the “now,” we learn to love ourselves and one another so deeply that our presence with one another creates havens of respite where we can exhale. In the “not yet,” we continue seeking justice and refuse to shut up until we have attained the full measure of freedom that is our right and entitlement as citizens of a supposedly “free” nation. By embracing the “now and not yet” tension of our freedom, we acknowledge the vast amount of work that is left to do while also being gentle with ourselves and carving out sacred space for gratitude and joy in the midst of the struggle.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“Anything that purports to be freedom but only belongs to a certain group or can only be attained by amassing power over other people isn’t freedom.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“Freedom that is gained at another person’s expense isn’t freedom; it is just diverted oppression. A lot of people who say they want freedom really just want to cosplay as oppressors by excluding and harming the people they believe are beneath them. We don’t get free by lording our power over others. Freedom is a collective endeavor that requires us to imagine a different world than the one we presently inhabit. As we imagine freedom, it is critical that we imagine freedom for all people.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“This is the essence of liberation: being seen in the fullness of who you are and being free to love and express yourself in a way that brings light and life to others.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“The losses that I have experienced on this journey of finding my voice have been just as instructive to me as the books I’ve read, the seminars I’ve attended, and any other means of knowledge acquisition I’ve engaged in. The difficult road I traveled has led me exactly where I needed to be exactly when I needed to be there. I don’t know if I will ever stop grieving certain losses, but I do know that those losses and their accompanying grief are tools I have used to stage my own liberation. You can use the ashes you hold from your grief to paint a beautiful picture of life and liberation.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“I am very tenderhearted and struggle with the idea of people being angry with or misunderstanding me. Setting boundaries is how I protect myself from being taken advantage of, apologizing for things that I don’t need to apologize for, or remaining in (or reentering) toxic spaces with people who care more about their own sense of dominance than healing. I will accept any genuine attempt toward reconciliation and healing, but the door becomes locked to anyone who feels the need to dump their feelings on me instead of approaching me like a human being. We don’t have to agree, but I refuse to be treated like an object.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“In the advocacy circles I run in, we talk a lot about going where you’re celebrated and not merely tolerated. We talk a lot about identifying and leaving places where you are unable to flourish. We talk about divesting from unjust systems, decentering whiteness, and decolonizing our minds. I don’t think we talk enough about the losses that come with doing those things.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“For a long time, I was overly concerned about hurting white people’s feelings as I sought justice and healing. I took it to heart when they unloaded their rage on me, and I tried to find pleasant ways to help them understand racism. I eventually realized that I was enabling their racism while allowing them to harm me. I think that a lot of folks cater to white people’s racial comfort because they conflate hurting someone’s feelings with doing them harm.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“You don’t have to become a social justice superhero who fights against every wrong you perceive in the world. It’s not humanly possible for one person to advocate for every cause out there, nor is it a reasonable use of one’s energy and resources. Instead of trying to fix everything, find something that is important to you and do what you can to become an advocate for that cause. One of the best ways that you can create change is by connecting with other like-minded people. Joining advocacy groups (or building a group where none exists) is a good way to learn more about issues and work toward solutions.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“Embracing nuance means recognizing that white supremacy and harm exist virtually everywhere, and so we must approach the world with curiosity and use our imaginations to envision how to redeem the broken parts. We need wisdom to know what needs to burn without burning ourselves.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“People who burn out usually do so because their newfound awareness causes them to try to bleed the white supremacy out of any and everything. They become overly scrupulous, refusing to participate in or enjoy everything they think could be “problematic.” They fight every battle, going to the mat over every instance where white supremacy shows up with the same level of tenacity for each offense. Large or small, every incident or slight raises the threat level to DEFCON 1 and must be dispensed with. They struggle to give people a chance to learn or course-correct out of fear that they could be giving place to white supremacy. They adopt a form of fundamentalism that seems principled on the exterior but often ends in existential crisis.

They chop away at the white supremacy they discern in everything, and they end up experiencing a personal crisis because they’ve left nothing to anchor themselves to.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“Over the years, I have watched so many people try to run this racial justice marathon like it is a sprint. They come off the starting line at full tilt, ready to “dismantle,” “interrogate,” and “divest of” (or whatever buzzwords and jargon seem to resonate with them the most) any and everything that has even a hint of white supremacy. The problem is that a lot of things in this world are tied to or corrupted by white supremacy. People will collapse from exhaustion before ever reaching the finish line, and the finish line is much farther away than it appears. When folks come off the line sprinting, one of three things usually happens: they retreat into silence, burn out, or become jaded.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“All too often, white-led organizations treat racial diversity as a commodity that can be used to build the institution. They are fine with our slang as long as they can co-opt it to make themselves look cool, but when we bring our words and phrases with us into the classroom, boardroom, or pulpit, they start to question our fitness for leadership. They’re fine with our clothes and our hairstyles when they can post pictures of us on their websites and social media, but if we’re going to hold any position of power or influence, they want us to look more “professional.” They can post #BlackLivesMatter on their socials, but when someone files a formal complaint about racism in the organization, they suddenly don’t understand how racism works.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“The question isn’t how big of a platform we can build and how many eyes we can get on our latest thing. It is easy to fall into thinking that our effectiveness is measured by how many people are listening to us, when, really, the measure of our success is whether we are contributing to good in our community—whatever community looks like for you in our ever-connected and increasingly virtual world.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“Living your life in an effort to avoid being dealt harm ain’t no kind of living.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“All I had was my keyboard and the resolve to make my corner of the world better. If racists could be loud and wrong, I was determined to be loud and right. I realized that I could combat the hateful things I was reading with messages of hope and truth that shouted into the void and commanded justice to come forth.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“Instead of addressing their racism, people in white-led institutions will try to silence us by making it seem like we are doing something wrong by offering pushback. Since they are “trying,” people in the institution don’t want to hear about how their efforts aren’t working. “We aren’t perfect” becomes a salve the institution applies to the wounds it inflicts as if the absence of perfection is supposed to make experiencing white supremacy hurt less.

“Trying” silences us by requiring us to accept mistreatment in the name of “learning,” “growth,” and false “unity.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“Integrating a space from which Black people have been historically excluded comes with experiencing the racism that kept us out to begin with.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“Leaders within the organization would recognize that I had a gift for leadership and would be eager for me to take on leadership roles. Then, when time came for me to lead, others within the organization (and sometimes the leaders that initially promoted me) would start to question my leadership. I’m not talking about the type of questioning and scrutiny that helps good leaders become more effective. It was much deeper than that. Not only did I have to demonstrate that I would continue to be an asset to the organization, I had to prove that I would not also be a liability.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“I have remained Christian even after my experiences in the white church because I don’t blame brown-skinned Jesus for white people’s racist behavior.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“I will try to say why I made certain choices when we get there, but the thing to bear in mind is that toxic people will have you convinced that you are the problem. And so I attached myself to toxic people and situations because I was not yet free enough to recognize that I was not the problem.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“When you are silent about your subjugation, it doesn’t stop people from subjugating you. If anything, it gives them permission to keep that same energy and to treat you as if you asked to be mistreated. When you push back against oppression, you might pay for it in lost opportunities, broken relationships, and other types of immediate, temporal consequences. What you gain, however, is the ability to maintain your dignity.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“What good does it do to say that something hurts when people ignore you or try to convince you that your pain isn’t real?”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“I learned that managing white people’s racism was my responsibility. I learned not to do anything that would make white people angry with me and thus incite their racism. I learned not to invite white people’s racism by doing anything that could play into stereotypes about Black people. I learned that it was my job to prevent white people from acting on their worst impulses.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“White noise conditions us to accept the status quo. It teaches us to “go along to get along” because it is much easier to tolerate something that feels relatively insignificant than to deal with the inevitable white rage that comes with telling someone they are being racist. White noise teaches us that there are consequences if we speak too loudly about injustice. It teaches us to swallow injustice and indignity because the threat of even worse treatment looms around the corner if we speak out. We learn to make little adjustments and accommodations that seem insignificant at the time but eventually add up. “Going along to get along” buys us the absence of conflict, but the cost is our freedom.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“White noise is also the steady drone of white supremacy that follows us practically everywhere we go. Its frequencies contain the range of human experience, except that those experiences are corrupted by racism. It is the everyday racism that we accept as such a part of living that we often don’t even recognize it as oppression. We sometimes find ourselves acquiescing to the white noise of subtle racism lest we do something to trigger a loud, offensive blast of racist static from white people.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“In beauty culture, people who hold contested identities are treated not as equals with the ability to redefine or destroy beauty standards, but as “influences” or “inspiration” for white women’s journeys to self-actualization, if their “influence” or “inspiration” is acknowledged at all.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“For all the gains the women’s movement has made over the past two centuries, we have done little to escape from a beauty culture that elevates white, able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual, skinny bodies over and above everyone else. It’s hard to take these so-called advancements seriously when the overall culture remains the same. Photo spreads that include fat women, disabled women, or women wearing hijab ring hollow when they are treated as an attempt to meet a quota instead of an opportunity to change the status quo. The only thing worse than outright exclusion is condescending inclusion that values our presence as long as we agree that we won’t do too much to confront our oppression.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You

“The juxtaposition of white praise and white rage became a diamond-encrusted muzzle that would stifle my voice for years.”
― Ally Henny, I Won't Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to Silence You