Racism
Ongoing discussion…
Racism
slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.
Ibram X. Kendi • How to Be an Antiracist
The great impulse of the courtroom seemed to be to put these people where they could not be seen—and not because they were offended at the crimes, unless, indeed, they were offended that the crimes were so petty, but because they did not wish to know that their society could be counted on to produce, probably in greater and greater numbers, a whole
... See moreJames Baldwin • Notes of a Native Son
and self-governing people would become ungovernable to colonizers.
Nathan Schneider • Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life
“while the cruelties of the white man toward the black man are among the heaviest counts in the indictment against humanity, colour prejudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature that breathes under the sun.”
James Baldwin • Notes of a Native Son
This is the true nature of awareness. When investigating our habits of mind, it can be helpful to open our awareness to include all that is in the mirror, without fixation or preferences.
Ruth King • Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out
largely the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body.
Ta-Nehisi Coates • Between the World and Me
Modernity’s coloniality is the elephant in the room.
At the core of modernity lies the belief that ‘there is no alternative’, that there is just one reality, one world — a singular, external world that pre-exists, and is separate from, our interactions with it. There is the world and then there is us — a fictitious notion that masquerades within... See more
At the core of modernity lies the belief that ‘there is no alternative’, that there is just one reality, one world — a singular, external world that pre-exists, and is separate from, our interactions with it. There is the world and then there is us — a fictitious notion that masquerades within... See more
Will Bull • Building the Infrastructure of Possibility
Their moves are at once personal and driven by a desire to connect; and if these artists do not expect to feel wholly at home anywhere in the world, neither do they assume America is the only, or the best, place to exercise their collaborative gifts.
Emily Lordi Manuel Obadia-Wills • The Black Artists Leaving America (Published 2021)
I was a dupe, a chump who saw the ongoing struggles of Black people on MLK Day 2000 and decided that Black people themselves were the problem. This is the consistent function of racist ideas—and of any kind of bigotry more broadly: to manipulate us into seeing people as the problem, instead of the policies that ensnare them.