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

“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

“Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say; whatever you are, you are woman.”

-Educated, by Tara Westover

“The poor and working classes, if united across race, could be a powerful force. But racial divisions have served to keep them from organizing against the owning class who profits from their labor.”

-White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

“But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.”

-Educated by Tara Westover

in the words of the great Elizabethan wordsmith William Shakespeare, in Hamlet Act IV Scene V, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” or, in the words of the great Twitter wordsmith @Horse_ebooks,