While Speaking Up Against...explicitly Racist Actions Is Critical, We Must Also Be Careful Not To Use

“While speaking up against...explicitly racist actions is critical, we must also be careful not to use them to keep ourselves on the ‘good’ side of a false binary. I have found it much more useful to think of myself as on a continuum. Racism is so deeply woven into the fabric of our society that I do not see myself escaping from that continuum in my lifetime. But I can continually seek to move further along it. I am not at a fixed position on the continuum; my position is dictated by what I am doing at a given time. Conceptualizing myself on an active continuum changes the question from whether I am or am not racist to a much more constructive question: Am I actively seeking to interrupt racism in this context?”

-White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

“Whites hold the social and institutional positions in society to infuse their racial prejudice into the laws, policies, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not. A person of color may refuse to wait on me if I enter a shop, but people of color cannot pass legislation that prohibits me and everyone like me from buying a home in a certain neighborhood.”

-White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

“She read about New Women. She hadn’t ever realized that she’d been an Old Woman, but after some thought she decided that titles like that were all one with the romance and the knitting and the orgasms, and the really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.”

-Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

“Having too little in life, being the underdog, is only good as backstory, not the constant every day of your breathing.”

-No One is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts

“People were always so sure other people didn’t care. Devon saw that with most people you had to come into their sight, not just be an idea, and then they could show their goodness plain.”

-No One is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts

“I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.” - Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963