" I recently told my mom about a hateful thing that had happened to me. Her response was to casually share a story I had never heard before. When she was new to the country, she was rammed by an irate fellow shopper in a grocery store, a random, race-motivated attack. Translation: What I had faced was nothing in comparison to how things used to be. According to my folks, I should get over it, because in the grand scheme of things, I am winning.

But am I? Compared to what she had to face on the regular, yes. Compared to what I dream for myself, no.

It is this personal accounting that gets me every time, listener friends. And here’s the truth of it all: Things are better for folks like me—the racialized, the marginalized, the Other. But because two truths can exist simultaneously in the universe, things are worse for us too. Real change is a boulder we keep pushing, but don’t fool yourself into thinking it doesn’t push back. Because it does. And sometimes it pushes back hard.

In my parents’ time, simply being acknowledged as worthy of notice, as having your own history and worth, was enough. That’s not enough for me. I want to be included and celebrated. I want nuanced and plentiful stories to be told about my people, and I don’t want it to mean something when one of us breaks through, because there are so many of us breaking through, all the time, in every field. "

― Uzma Jalaluddin , Hana Khan Carries On