I recently heard an interview with Charles Blow,
which deeply moved me. We have much to learn
from wise voices such as his. — Molly
Quotes from Charles M. Blow
We need to see people other than ourselves in order to empathize. If we don't live around others we do ourselves and our society damage because our ability to relate becomes impaired. It's easy to demonize, or simply dismiss, people you don't know or see...It's nearly impossible to commiserate with the unseen and unknown.
One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.
People think that they avoid the appellation [white supremacist] because they do not openly hate. But hate is not a requirement of white supremacy. Just because one abhors violence and cruelty doesn't mean that one truly believes that all people are equal — culturally, intellectually, creatively, morally.
But
in the binding, as is always the case, the precise, particular
grievance of Black America is ever in danger of subsumption. The Black
battle is not necessarily joined but hijacked, overwhelmed, by the white
liberal grievance.
Too many of the Black elite get drafted into white-adjacent privilege, suckled by personal prosperity and personal comfort, blinded by the glamour of the high society. They become the neo house Negroes, placated, passive, a resurrection of an antebellum relic in which the best and brightest of Black society, those who would otherwise be the generals in resistance and rebellion, are lulled to sleep by luxuries.
In some cases, white allies even began to center their own maltreatment while protesting rather than the fundamental issue at hand: the treatment of Black people throughout their lives. How dare the police treat these white liberals poorly, unfairly assault or arrest them? For Black people, state violence and injustice are an intrinsic reality; for white liberals, it was a jarring outrage, an assault on their privilege.
White
supremacy cannot be appeased. It can't be bargained with. It can't be
convinced. White supremacy is a ravenous and vicious. It is America's
embryonic fluid. America was born in it and genetically coded by it. No
amount or hoping or waiting, coalition-building or Kumbaya can redress
that reality. Racism is a flaw in the oppressor, not the oppressed.
Equality must be won — by every generation — because it will never be freely granted.
* * * * *
It has been my experience that the "hardest" people in the world are actually the most fragile and the most soft-spoken are the strongest.
Children see God every day; they just don't call it that. It's the summer sky painted with cumulus clouds by day and sequined with a million stars by night. It's the sweet whispers of sweet gum trees and the sounds riding the tops of honeysuckle-scented breezes. Children feel God stuffed into brown fluffy dogs with stitches strong enough to withstand a good squeeze, and on the lips of round women who can't get enough sugar from Chocolate... I began to believe that God is us and nature, beauty and love, mystery and majesty, everything right and good.
What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.
Children can’t see their budding lives through the long lens of wisdom – the wisdom that benefits from years passed, hurdles overcome, strength summoned, resilience realized, selves discovered and accepted, hearts broken but mended and love experienced in the fullest, truest majesty that the word deserves. For them, the weight of ridicule and ostracism can feel crushing and without the possibility of reprieve. And, in that dark and lonely place, desperate and confused, they can make horrible decisions that can’t be undone.
Whenever Black people make progress, white people feel threatened and respond forcefully. Emancipation and the Civil War gave rise to the KKK, which formed just months after the war ended. The Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs. Board of Education striking down racial segregation in schools gave rise to the white supremacist Citizen's Councils. The election of the first Black president gave rise to the Tea Party, which was formed soon after Barack Obama was sworn in.
Systems
now do the bulk of the work; there is a perpetualness to racialized
poverty and oppression. At a certain point – one long since passed in
America – little effort is required to maintain the structures.
Hopelessness and despair seep into the psyche. The damage becomes
generational inheritance and culture caste.
I write a lot about disadvantaged people, particularly vulnerable children, because I feel that that's who I was. That is familiar terrain for me. And I try to write about things that are very close to me because I want people to feel the passion that I have for the subject.
* * * * *
Eight states – Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Idaho, Wyoming, and Iowa – are over 90 percent white and control one out of every six senate seats in America. The Black population is four times the population of those eight states combined but controls no senate seats.
The same year that the Civil War ended, the two states among those with the largest percentage of Black people – Mississippi, with 54 percent in the 1870 census, and South Carolina, with 59 percent – passed what came to be known as “Black codes,” a repressive slate of laws to “regulate the Domestic Relations of Persons of Colour.” These laws forced freedmen into contractual labor agreements, which looked eerily similar to slavery, with white farmers. The South Carolina act even stipulated that “all persons of color who make contracts for service or labor, shall be known as servants, and those with whom they contract, shall be known as masters.” Freedmen without “some lawful and respectable employment” could be charged with vagrancy. They literally made Black unemployment a crime for Black people.
White women have known from the beginning in this country that they possess this power, the power to activate white supremacy and spur it to extreme violence... The activation of white terror is a white woman's soft power... We like to masculinize white supremacy, to presume it reeks of testosterone, when in fact, it is just as likely to be spritzed by perfume.
Forty percent of slave owners were white women. It was white women who made the market for Black women's breast milk and who were attended by Black women in the big house. It was white women who upheld much of the day-to-day white supremacy – the schoolteachers, the store clerks, the waitresses. And it is now often white women activating police interactions with Black people.
Our politics are overrun with characters acting at the behest of shadows.
Now you have to decide whether or not you want to be part of the bigotry that is Donald Trump. You have to decide whether you want to be part of the sexism and misogyny that is Donald Trump.
Trump’s America is not America: not today’s or tomorrow’s, but yesterday’s.
Trump’s America is brutal, perverse, regressive, insular and afraid. There is no hope in it; there is no light in it. It is a vast expanse of darkness and desolation.
And that is a vision of America that most of the people in this country cannot and will not abide.
* * * * *
A lie is like a cat: you need to stop it before it gets out the door or it’s really hard to catch.
I don't know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff wire.
It took centuries for America to hone its instruments of oppression. Every time part of it fell, it simply re-emerged in a more elegant form. Battling racism in this country is like cutting heads off the Hydra.
America is essentially operating a network of debtors' prisons. In 2017 in New York, $268 million in bail bonds was posted and another $53 million was posted in cash bail. For people using commercial bail companies, they paid $27 million in nonrefundable fees, and the city reaped $15 million in forfeited or abandoned cash bail.
Progress is the wall behind which white America hides. (Even many Black leaders have absorbed and regurgitate the progress narrative.) White liberals expect Black people to applaud their efforts. But how is that a fair and legitimate expectation? Slavery, white supremacy, and racism are horrid, man-made constructs that should never have existed in the first place. Are we meant to cheer the slow, creeping, centuries-long undoing of a thing that never should have been done?
Co-opted convictions will always betray you.
It
would only be in the cold gaze of hindsight that I would be able to
comprehend that while in flight from pain, I became an agent of it.
I better understood the little lies that liquor told, lifting spirits and drowning sorrows while withholding the whole truth ― that, in the end, it is the spirit in peril of drowning. Sorrows have gills.
Different is not deviant, no matter what the world may say. You have the moral obligation to love yourself.
* * * * *
There is no wrong time to do the right thing.
Voter apathy is a civic abdication.
Great
leadership isn’t shaped in the absence of opposition but in the
presence of it. Great leaders draw us together by our universal
humanity; they galvanize the wills of the willing; they draw clarity
from the spigot of chaos.
The only way to vanquish cowardice is to brandish courage.
Time ground to a halt and the trees whispered in the language of God and nature about steadfastness and resilience — gently saying that one could be constantly stirred yet not moved, bent but not broken, that a thing well grounded and deeply rooted could ever stand.
There was no hierarchy of humanity.... And no one could strip me of my value and dignity, because no one had bestowed them — these things came into the world with me.
I would harness the truths that had been trapped in me like a fire shut up in my bones. I would give my life over to my passions, my writing, and my children, and they would breathe life back into me.
I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.
It was the kind of building that remembered things, deep-down things, things that rode tears into the world, telling them back to anyone old enough or wise enough to know how to listen with their eyes.
Vulnerability is the leading edge of truth. Being willing to sacrifice a false life is the only way to live a true one.
https://www.nytimes.com/by/charles-m-blow
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/26/960665185/charles-blow-s-the-devil-you-know-is-a-black-power-manifesto-for-our-time
