“Vi blir lätt stötta om vår egen personlighet och vårt sätt att vara beskrivs som typiskt för vår kultur eftersom det inte gör rättvisa åt oss som individer: vi betraktar inte vårt eget beteende som typiskt, utan som uttryck för vår egen identitet och våra personliga val. Det här är trots allt något som vi lätt glömmer bort när vi vänder blicken mot andra: de andra beskrivs ofta utgående från vad som anses typiskt för deras kultur.”
“I want to be talked to. The world needs to accept us as people with strengths and weaknesses. For generations of Kurds, life has begun and ended in violence. I hope that time has passed.”
“To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist. [...] We cannot be antiracist if we are homophobic or transphobic. [...] All Black lives include those of poor transgender Black women, perhaps the most violated and oppressed of all the Black intersectional groups.”
“Yes, it is true women of color have been the targets of a setup of monumental proportions, something that amounts to nothing short of a covert war against us. But it is also true that these attacks are their own proof of just how serious a threat to the status quo all women of color really are. So serious, in fact, that the very concept of the innocent white woman was constructed to keep us firmly in our place.”
“If Jesus came back today, Republicans would stop him at the border.”
“Such are the incalculable effects of that negative passion of indifference, that hysterical and speculative resurrection of the other. Racism, for example. Logically, it should have declined with the advance of Enlightenment and democracy. Yet the more hybrid our cultures become, and the more the theoretical and genetic bases of racism crumble away, the stronger it grows. But this is because we are dealing here with a mental object, an artificial construct, based on an erosion of the singularity of cultures and entry into the fetishistic system of difference. So long as there is otherness, strangeness and the (possibly violent) dual relation -- as we see in anthropological accounts up to the eighteenth century and into the colonial phase -- there is no racism properly so-called. Once that `natural relation is lost, we enter into a phobic relationship with an artificial other, idealized by hatred. And because it is an ideal other, this relationship is an exponential one: nothing can stop it, since the whole trend of our culture is towards a fanatically pursued differential construction, a perpetual extrapolation of the same from the other. Autistic culture by dint of fake altruism. All forms of sexist, racist, ethnic or cultural discrimination arise out of the same profound disaffection and out of a collective mourning, a mourning for a dead otherness, set against a background of general indifference -- a logical product of our marvellous planet-wide conviviality. The same indifference can give rise to exactly opposite behaviour. Racism is desperately seeking the other in the form of an evil to be combated. The humanitarian seeks the other just as desperately in the form of victims to aid. Idealization plays for better or for worse. The scapegoat is no longer the person you hound, but the one whose lot you lament. But he is still a scapegoat. And it is still the same person.”
“A line between white and black had been drawn in my life. I straddled that line with an ache I had no name for. An ache I now understand as identity crisis.”
“All societies that have tried to keep themselves ‘pure,’ from the Confucian Chinese through to the Castilian Spanish to the post-Wilhelmine Germans, have collapsed into barbarism, insularity and superstition. And swiftly enough for us to be certain that the fall was no more connected to the genes than was the rise. There is no gene for I.Q., and there is no genetic or evolutionary timing that is short enough to explain histories or societies.”
“The task for each of us, White and of color, is to identify what our own sphere of influence is (however large or small) and to consider how it might be used to interrupt the cycle of racism.”
“President Trump has changed the presidency by speaking for himself. A signature aspect of this characteristic is his facility with quick denunciations of melting intensity. In June 2017, the president criticized the mayor of London for being soft on terrorists just hours after his city was attacked. He dinged California forest management officials in the middle of record fires that were scorching acres in November 2018. The president sent twenty-seven tweets about NFL players protesting racial injustice by choosing to kneel during the national anthem, a practice he found repugnant. He tweeted eighty-four times suggesting that President Obama was not born in America. Whether his target is a federal judge, Gold Star parents, or weather-battered officials in Puerto Rico, Donald Trump says what is on his mind immediately and doesn t sweat the nuances. By contrast, the president s six tweets in the aftermath of the Charlottesville violence never referred to racism or bigotry or white nationalism. When Trump is passionate about something, it s unmistakable. So why did the president lapse into vagueness when it came to Charlottesville?”
“We have been winning running barefoot, imagine what would happen if we had spikes, a nutritionist and a coach we would break records.”
“In life, we have been running barefoot and winning. Imagine what would happen if we had spikes, a nutritionist and a coach we would break records.”
“We like to filter new information through our own experiences to see if it computes. If it matches up with what we have experiences, it s valid. If it doesn t match up, it s not. But race is not a universal experience. If you are white, there is a good chance you may have been poor at some point in your life, you may have been sick, you may have been discriminated against for being fat or being disabled or being short or being conventionally unattractive, you may have been many things—but you have not been a person of color. So, when a person of color comes to you and says this is different for me because I m not white, when you run the situation through your own lived experience, it often won t compute. This is usually where the desire to dismiss claims of racial oppression come from—it just doesn t make sense to you so it cannot be right. But if you are white, and you are feeling this way, I ask you this: is your lived experience real? Are the situations you ve lived through real? Are your interpretations of those situations valid?...So if your lived experience and your interpretation of that lived experience are valid, why wouldn t the lived experience of people of color be just as valid? If I don t have the right to deem your life, what you see and hear and feel, a lie, why do you have the right to do that to me? Why do you deserve to be believed and people of color don t?”
“PROVEN BIAS HAS COME TO BE THE VIRTUE OF A LEADER. Bias has become the first qualification to join a party, and extreme bias the virtue to become a leader.”
“...it is always a bit of a gut punch to realize that someone you have been sitting next to for months or even years secretly harbors view that deny your basic humanity as a black woman. No matter how many times it happens, I have yet to get used to it. ...I really really wanted this to be just a matter of misunderstanding. I really wanted this to be a case where he just didn t know how harmful everyday racism is, and once he did, he would change his mind...It seemed far more important to him that the white people who were spreading and upholding racism be spared the effects of being called racist, than sparing his black friend the effects of that racism. ...That was when I learned that this was not a friend I could take to about this really important part of my life. I couldn t be my full self around him, and he would never truly have my back. He was not safe. I wasn t angry, I was heartbroken.”
“Something was making poor people poor, according to this idea. And it was welfare. Welfare transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it, U.S. senator Barry Goldwater wrote in The Conscience of the Conservative in 1960. Goldwater and his ideological descendants said little to nothing about rich White people who depended on the welfare of inheritances, tax cuts, government contracts, hookups, and bailouts.”
“If the authorities of society are not in the course of reason and assimilation then rejecting such authorities and replacing them with a logical and humane alternative is not anarchy, it s the existential duty of every thinking and feeling human.”