Regimes of racial segregation were not disestablished because of the work of leaders and presidents and legislators, but rather because of the fact that ordinary people adopted a critical stance in the way in which they perceived their relationship to reality.

It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.

And so Du Bois argues that it was the withdrawal and bestowal of labor by slaves that won the war.

By this time everybody who may have been hoping that Obama was the messiah realized that he was simply the president of the United States of America.

The movement we call the “civil rights movement,” and that was called by most of its participants the “freedom movement,” reveals an interesting slippage between freedom and civil rights, as if civil rights has colonized the whole space of freedom, that the only way to be free is to acquire civil rights within the existing framework of society.

The problem was that many of us then thought that what we needed to do was to expand the category “women” so that it could embrace Black women, Latina women, Native American women, and so forth. We thought that by doing that we would have effectively addressed the problem of the exclusivity of the category. What we didn’t realize then was that we

Racism is so dangerous because it does not necessarily depend on individual actors, but rather is deeply embedded in the apparatus…

Certainly we need a great deal more than talk, but it is also the case that we need to learn how to talk about race and racism. If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.

Well, I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic.