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41 " Girls like me seemed to be the object of the conversations and not full participants, because we were a problem to be solved, not people in our own right. "
― Mikki Kendall , Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
42 " It's time to treat domestic violence and hate speech as the neon red flags they are and take the necessary steps to reduce the risks instead of hoping that they'll go away. "
43 " Just as fear of a Black man was used to justify lynching, fear of offending other white women has become the excuse for not confronting the harm white women are doing to themselves in their haste to uphold the limited protections offered by white privilege. "
44 " Attempts to tie access to food programs to labor, to respectability, to anything but being a human in need are ultimately less about solving the problem of hunger and more about shame. "
45 " Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege. For a movement that is meant to represent all women, it often centers on those who already have most of their needs met. "
46 " We have to be willing to embrace the full autonomy of people who are less privileged and understand that equity means making access to opportunity easier, not deciding what opportunities they deserve. "
47 " some 40 to 60 percent of Black American girls are sexually abused before age eighteen. And those girls are likely to be labeled fast-tailed retroactively by people who need to believe that what happened to them was their fault. "
48 " Girls in the hood must learn to present only the fraction of themselves deemed acceptable while also working twice as hard to get half as far in life. "
49 " But niceness is more than helping; it is stopping to listen, to connect, to be gentle with your words. "
50 " She taught me distrust. What progressives who ignore history don’t understand is that just like racism is taught, so is distrust. "
51 " Hunger has a lifelong impact, shaping not only someone's relationship with food but also their health and the health of their community. Hunger, real hunger, provokes desperation and leads to choices that might otherwise be unfathomable. "
52 " Going into a white woman’s kitchen did nothing to help other women. Those jobs had always been available, always paid poorly, always been dangerous "
53 " We need to let go of respectability politics and understand that whiteness as a construct will never approve of us, and that the approval of white supremacy is not something that we or any community should be seeking. We have to be willing to embrace the full autonomy of people who are less privileged and understand that equity means making access to opportunity easier, not deciding which opportunities they deserve. "
54 " When some bigoted white people heard the message of Donald Trump and others in the GOP that their concerns mattered, that the fear generated by their own biases had a target in Mexican and Muslim immigrants, many embraced the GOP to their own detriment. We talk at length about the 53 percent of white women who supported the Republican candidate for president, but we tend to skim past the reality that many white voters had been overtly or passively supporting the same problematic candidates and policies for decades. Researchers point to anger and disappointment among some whites as a result of crises like rising death rates from suicide, drugs, and alcohol; the decline in available jobs for those who lack a college degree; and the ongoing myth that white people are unfairly treated by policies designed to level the playing field for other groups—policies like affirmative action. Other studies have pointed to the appeal of authoritarianism, or plain old racism and sexism. Political scientist Diana Mutz said in an interview in Pacific Standard magazine that some voters who switched parties to vote for Trump were motivated by the possibility of a fall in social status: “In short, they feared that they were in the process of losing their previously privileged positions. "
55 " But as adults, as people who are doing hard work, you cannot expect your feelings to be the center of someone else’s struggle. "
56 " none of those programs are enough to effectively combat hunger on their own. They need more. More resources, more employees, more efforts by the government to solve the problem across the country. And they don’t have the connections, resources, or time to lobby politicians and provide services. Charity may begin at home, but it is fundamentally incapable of solving a societal ill without some measure of government-funded programs that are less focused on being restrictive or punitive and more focused on making sure that the most vulnerable are cared for regardless of income. "
57 " There’s no magic shield in being middle class that can completely insulate you from the consequences of being in a body that’s already been criminalized for existing. "
58 " The myths of the Strong Black Woman from chapter one, the Wise Indian, the Submissive Asian, and the Sassy Latina do more than show up in bad TV shows. They influence the perception that women who are not white do not experience a full range of emotions, much less suffer from the same mental health issues. "
59 " There’s nothing empowering about the idea that the road to their sexual freedom is making a fetish costume out of a culture. "
60 " The labor (physical and emotional) of low-income women is often abused and unappreciated. We are constantly watching them struggle and pretending it is voluntary and not a result of a system upheld by a powerful few that is fundamentally anti-Black and patriarchal. "