Racism

Now, recall a moment of loving presence with another person or a moment of deep gratitude. Bring that recollection into your heart and mind. Allow yourself to recall that moment as fully as you can, as a way of igniting your direct experience with care, with kindness.

One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist.

We can say, to put it briefly, that up to the present mankind has known two principal forms of oppression, the one (slavery or serfdom) exercised in the name of armed force, the other in the name of wealth thus transformed into capital; what we have to determine is whether these are not now being succeeded by a new species of oppression, oppression

The logic of apartheid is difficult to follow, for it seems from our vantage point a strange kind of illogic. Liberal multiculturalism takes for granted that the route to racial harmony is mutual understanding, and the route to understanding is contact, exposure, conversation. So our modern studies show that those who know actual black people, or

I may well have been the most qualified person for the job. But it wasn’t a fair competition, and in acting like it was fair, and accepting my prize without question, I helped ensure that it would stay unfair.

how Blackness is selectively celebrated (and contained) within the white imagination.

the ammunition to shoot Black people, to shoot myself, and I took and used it. Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime.

Minor feelings are not often featured in contemporary American literature because these emotions do not conform to the archetypal narrative that highlights survival and self-determination.