Racism

At its core, police brutality is about power and corruption. Police brutality is about the intersection of fear and guns. Police brutality is about accountability. And the power and corruption that enable police brutality put all citizens, of every race, at risk. But it does not put us at risk equally, and the numbers bear that out.

out of raw self-interest; the racist policies necessitate racist ideas to justify them—lingers over the life of racism.

what I call minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and

Fear becomes anxiety when it makes its home in you. Its chief attachment is not memory or villain or situation or future; its chief attachment and subject is you. This strange and imprecise fear can torment the body and enshroud all other fear experiences.

it allows us to focus on how—rather than if—our racism is manifest. When we move beyond the good/bad binary, we can become eager to identify our racist patterns because interrupting those patterns becomes more important than managing how we think we look to others.

In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt by many future generations, the white man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity. And despite the terrorization which the Negro in America endured and endures sporadically until

The teacher looked at her, looked away, and instead called on a White hand as soon as it was raised. As the Black girl’s arm came down, I could see her head going down. As I saw her head going down, I could see her spirits going down. I turned and looked up at the teacher, who, of course, was not looking at me. She was too busy engaging a favored

Colonialism has fundamentally altered our relationships with the web of life, and we are all living with its consequences. When Europe began its pillage of the Western Hemisphere in 1492, Indigenous cosmologies of reciprocity, relationships with and duties of care for water, land, and living beings were uprooted, replaced with a worldview animated