Racism

if we embrace the beauty of all creation, we find our own beauty magnified. And what is shalom but dignity stretched out like a blanket over the cosmos?

And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do.

Epistemicide is at the heart of colonization, but we cannot decolonize our minds by unknowing modernity. Like it or not, your belonging is dependent on a reclamation of the dismissed ancient and a reconciliation with the dominant modern.

Seemingly contradictory calls to lock up and to save Black people dueled in legislatures around the country but also in the minds of Americans. Black leaders joined with Republicans from Nixon to Reagan, and with Democrats from Johnson to Bill Clinton, in calling for and largely receiving more police officers, tougher and mandatory sentencing, and

Before the door shut behind him, he bellowed, “I don’t open doors for chinks!” My sister burst into tears. She couldn’t understand why he was so mean. “That’s never happened to me before,” she cried. I wanted to run back into the mall and kill him. I had failed to protect my younger sister and I was helpless in my murderous rage against a grown man

Audre Lorde eloquently addressed her thoughts on white guilt at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in 1981: I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of

While white Americans fetishize the idea of living in racial harmony, they don’t think about the millions of instances of antiblack sentiment—overt and subtle—we encounter on a daily basis from the white world that has opened its doors to us but has done little remodeling.