I Was Co-leading A Workshop With An African American Man. A White Participant Said To Him, I Dont See

“I was co-leading a workshop with an African American man. A white participant said to him, ‘I don’t see race; I don’t see you as black.’ My co-trainer’s response was ‘Then how will you see racism?’”

-White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

“You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He’d see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. ‘Why,’ he’d say, ‘what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.’ He’d never guess we’re not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. ‘What a helpful race of beings,’ a Martian would say. Don’t you think so?” - Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

Ce que je pense (et c’est cela que je voulais dire) c’est que je devrais pousser un grand et beau cri, un long et joyeux cri qui résonnerait dans toute la vallée, que c’est ce bonheur-là que je devrais m’offrir, hurler une bonne fois, mais je ne le fais pas, je ne l’ai pas fait. Je me remets en route avec seul le bruit de mes pas sur le gravier.

Ce sont des oublis comme celui-là que je regretterai.

— Jean-Luc Lagarce, Juste la fin du monde

“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

“It’s so much harder to actually define yourself and work to imagine the best possible future than it is to tear down others’ ideas.”

-An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

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,