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21 " Migration is always a choice to live. The opposite of migration is not citizenship. It is containment, the condition of being unfree shared with all who are considered less than citizens. The migrant reminds the citizen of the rights that they should be guaranteed. "
― Jeff Chang , We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation
22 " Nations are made of papers. Papers make the border. Papers also turn the migrant into the immigrant. The word 'immigrant' is a formal legal term. It centers not the person, but the nation in which the person hopes to become a citizen. 'Migration' centers bodies. 'Immigration' centers bodies of law. The immigrant is therefore always troubled by the question of status: 'legal' or 'illegal.' When the immigrant is between the migrant and the citizen, their freedom - and others' freedom, in turn - depends upon the answer. How can a human being be illegal? Laws come from people. That is to say, they come from citizens. And yet what does it mean to be a citizen? "
23 " A turn in fortune should move us toward empathy and solidarity....But we live in a time when merchants of division draw us away from mutuality and toward the undoing of democracy itself. "
24 " What does it mean to be in-between? It means one can afford to sit on the fence, decide not to take a stand, to always reserve the privilege - while the battle rages all around - to disengage. "
25 " The future of desegregation was not just about reaching mere numerical diversity. It was about fostering radical diversity, the wild protean sort. It was about what might flower when people could really meet across the lines. The cover of the fifth volume of the Yardbird Reader, rendered in day-bright Oakland A’s yellow and green, featured the collective caught as they laughed at someone’s wisecrack. They looked simultaneously hip and welcoming. In this colorized vision of American renewal, everyone could share in the joy. "
― Jeff Chang , Who We Be: The Colorization of America
26 " Formalism was a language made for and by elites, a way through which art history would be recorded. It never aspired to be a way through which the masses might encounter and enjoy art. "
27 " Finding grace is an individual process that changes the social. It is about seeing each other in the world and seeing one's own place in the world anew. In that way grace can counter the lies, refusals, and aggressions that drive us toward segregation. We live in serious times, in which we need to be roused to the inequity in our neighborhoods, our schools, our metro areas, our justice system, our culture. Ending resegregation is about understanding the ways we allow ourselves to stop seeing the humanity of others. It is about learning again to look, and never stopping. "
28 " The horizon toward which we move always recedes before us. The revolution is never complete. What we see now as solid and eternal may be disintegrating inward from our blind spots. All that signifies progress may in time be turned against us. But redemption is out there for us if we are always in the process of finding love and grace. "
29 " Millions wanted to see shows written, directed, and acted by people of colour telling stories about themselves. Duh. "
30 " Black Lives Matter' articulated an impatience with the politics of respectability. Proponents of respectability politics, Randall Kennedy wrote, 'advocate taking care in presenting oneself publicly and desire strongly to avoid saying or doing anything that will reflect badly on Blacks, reinforce negative racial stereotypes, or needlessly alienate potential allies.' Such politics were resurgent during the Obama era. The president himself was both a source and symbol of respectability politics. "
31 " Later, many would debate whether [Michael Brown Jr.] actually had his hands up when he was shot. Some pundits asking if the movement had been built on a lie. But that debate missed the point: the image resonated--and would continue to grow in the public imagination--because it captured a bigger truth, a deeper feeling. 'Hands Up' was about the ways we saw race in post-civil rights America, and perhaps especially about what we refused to see--the blindness of a 'post-racial' era. If, as intellectual Ruth Gilmore had written, racism was about the ways in which Blacks, whites, and others differently experienced 'vulnerability to premature death,' 'Hands Up' was an argument for the right to live. "
32 " Diversity allows whites to remove themselves while requiring the Other to continue performing for them. "
33 " The word 'citizen' confers rights, rights that are invisible, that really appear only when they are denied... You live in a racial state that formally denies difference, but in practice avows it, through the barrel of a gun or the conferring of papers. "
34 " And so diversity remains a premonition of racial apocalypse; a photo op and dash; a commodity conveying value; a marker of moral credibility, even fitness in the Darwinian sense; a term of corporate management; an offering of racial innocence and absolution; a refusal of protection to historically negated communities of color; a performance for entertainment or edification or exploitation; another boring lesson in tolerance and civility; a mark of Otherness. "
35 " Resegregation grows not from white ignorance, but from white refusal and denial. And so half a century after the perk of the civil rights movement, the nation has moved again into crisis. "
36 " In every generation, radicals nurture scorn for authority and the old. They tap into a desire to destroy convention and induce shock. They demand tribal commitment and discipline. They risk everything to bring the new into being. "
― Jeff Chang , Can't Stop Won't Stop: A Hip-Hop History
37 " The truth would be difficult to speak, but it would be necessary to begin to right the wrongs done to Blacks and Coloureds. Reconciliation would not be a gift, but an 'exchange for truth.' In other words, peace and justice are inseparable from each other. "
38 " ... He turned to face the police now. 'You are on the wrong side of history, and we have already won,' he said to them. 'We are peacefully gathered here in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Gandhi .. This multiracial gathering is possible because of nonviolence. And that is the heartbeat of democracy that you here.' 'And so whoever your captain is, stand down. Go home,' he said. 'We'll be alright.' The crowd laughed again. All along the police lie, stiffened backs seemed to wilt. Then the cops turned to the left in file, turned again, and marched silently away down Grand Street. "