I heard an excellent talk by Charles Blow today, which inspires me to share these illuminating quotes. — Molly
I think it's easier to understand privilege when you think of it as privilege and oppression existing as a seesaw. You are only up because I am down.
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 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.
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.
Co-opted convictions will always betray you.
* * * * *
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.
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.
No one knows how to hold a grudge like a proper Southerner.
As long as the northern liberals could maintain the illusion of their moral superiority, they could also justify their own lack of progress in terms of racial equality. The North’s arrogant insistence that it had no race problem, or at least a minimal one, allowed a racialized police militarism to take root and flourish there. It was a kind of once-removed racism in which individual citizens could keep their hands clean, claiming deniability for the oppression that they passively facilitated. It allowed a balkanized housing and education segregation to develop in supposedly “diverse” cities. It allowed for the rise of Black ghettos and concentrated poverty as well as white flight and urban disinvestment.
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.
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.
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 embryotic 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.
* * * * *
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.
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.
Voter apathy is a civic abdication.
* * * * *
Equality must be won — by every generation — because it will never be freely granted.
Millions of people, hitherto confined to homes by a deadly pandemic and a halted economy, poured into the street, mostly young, mostly white, to assert that Black lives matter, and to demand police accountability and reform as well as racial justice and equality. A Pew Research Center report in late June 2020 found that 6 percent of American adults said they attended a protest or rally that focused on issues related to race or racial equality in the month preceding the survey. (My husband and I both attended multiple BLM rallies during the pandemic.)
But Black people are still too heavily indoctrinated into a philosophy that promises comfort, justice, and peace in an afterlife, particularly to those who don’t have it in this one. Karl Marx was right when he called religion “the opium of the people.” So long as people are shouting in church they are less likely to shout in the streets.
Black people are told that the racists will soon die off and we will be left with a society blissfully free of racial prejudice. This is magical thinking. Generations of people have died waiting on the racists to die out. Black people are told that the racial progress America has made and continues to make is undeniable, and we should take heart in that fact. It has been four hundred years since “20 and odd” enslaved Africans stolen from what would now be Angola disembarked the privateer White Lion at Point-Comfort, Virginia, in 1619. The vast majority of that time has seen the active, vicious oppression of Black people in this country: 250 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow, and now 50-plus years of mass incarceration.
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?
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 fact, the events Obama referenced were not hopes or ripples, but actions. During his presidency he helped popularize the quotation, which was born of a nineteenth-century Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker, and paraphrased by Martin Luther King Jr., “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I say that it doesn’t simply bend as a consequence of natural progression; it must be bent, with great force and at great cost. And, I say that the time for hoping and waiting, as a political strategy among Black people, must end. The path to power and relief from racial oppression is before us. We need to take it.
*****
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...
I say, seeking to diminish the human dignity of another whose only crime is not loving whom you would have him or her love is immoral and an offense to the indomitable determination of the heart.
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.
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.
A heart still works even when it's broken.
I had to stop romanticizing the man I might have been and be the man that I was, not by neatly fitting other people’s definitions of masculinity or constructs of sexuality, but by being uniquely me—made in the image of God, nurtured by the bosom of nature, and forged in the fire of life.
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.
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.
The only way to vanquish cowardice is to brandish courage.
* * * * *
As Monnica T. Williams, a psychologist and associate professor at the University of Connecticut, wrote in Psychology Today in 201521: We are surrounded by constant reminders that race-related danger can occur at any time, anywhere, to anyone. We might see clips on the nightly news featuring unarmed African Americans being killed on the street, in a holding cell, or even in a church. Learning of these events brings up an array of painful racially-charged memories, and what has been termed “vicarious traumatization.” Even if the specific tragic news item has never happened to us directly, we may have had parents or aunts who have had similar experiences, or we know people in our community who have, and their stories have been passed down. Over the centuries the Black community has developed a cultural knowledge of these sorts of horrific events, which then primes us for traumatization when we hear about yet another act of violence. Another unarmed Black man has been shot by police in our communities and nowhere feels safe.
* * * * *
But vulnerability is the leading edge of truth. Being wiling to sacrifice a false life is the only way to live a true one.
Life is a series of peaks and valleys, and it is a fool's errand to try to flatten them out...beauty is in the connections we make, to self, to family, to friends, to the Earth.
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.
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.
Trying hard and working hard is its own reward. It feeds the soul. It affirms your will and your power. And it radiates from you, lighting the way for all those who see you.
This is the reason I write, to remind people of honor and courage; to tell them that their cause isn’t lost, that their destiny is victory.
There is no wrong time to do the right thing.
— Charles M. Blow
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