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Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man QUOTES

Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man QUOTES

1 " White privilege is about the word white, not rich. It's having advantage built into your life. It's not saying your life hasn't been hard; it's saying your skin color hasn't contributed to the difficulty in your life. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

2 " The beautiful thing about the piano is that you got white keys and you got black keys. And the only way to make the most beautiful, magnificent, and poetic noise is with both sets of keys working in tandem. You can’t just play all white keys, because you won’t maximize what the instrument has to offer. You can’t just play all black keys, because you won’t maximize what the instrument has to offer. But integrate the white and black keys together, and that is when the piano makes a joyful noise. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

3 " To clarify: defunding the police doesn’t mean abolishing the police, though there are more radical calls for that, too. It instead means redirecting money from police budgets to other government agencies funded by the city. Defunding the police could mean more money for underfunded schools, for mental health programs, or for drug recovery programs, all of which can help to reduce crime. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

4 " There’s no White History Month because we celebrate the accomplishments of white people Every. Single. Day. White people have always been esteemed in this country, have always been celebrated. Black people have had to push to celebrate themselves and their culture in public. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

5 " Do good work, but don’t make the mistake of caring more about your intentions than about the impact of your intentions, or seeking out gratitude or praise. Make sure you aren’t engaged in optical allyship—the kind that goes only so far as it takes to get the right post for social media. True allyship is a commitment to fight this fight for the long haul: long after it ceases to be a top-of-the-fold news item, long after the cameras have stopped capturing it. Not today, but tomorrow, next week, next year, next decade. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

6 " Everyone, and I mean everyone, has biases. It’s the job of empathetic and considerate people not to let them dictate actions that harm others. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

7 " Know that when you say you are an ally, you are saying that you are willing to risk your white privilege in the name of justice and equality for marginalized voices. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

8 " Nobody comes to a game to see the players huddle. They come to see the players execute the plays that are called in the huddle. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

9 " Vote, vote, vote, vote like your life depends on it. Like our lives depend on it. They do. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

10 " Those of us who know our whites know one thing above all else: whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, against its own laws and customs. —TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

11 " True allyship demands that it move from conversation to action. And that action will include risks. This isn’t the 1830s or the 1930s, 1950s, or 1968, but I won’t lie to you and say it’ll be easy. The risks might be something as small as a distant social media friend unfriending you. But it could be something more severe, like ostracism from an intimate friend group, job insecurity, public or private ridicule, friction with loved ones. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

12 " The lesson there is that being an ally means showing up. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

13 " Let’s think about what this means: race was a political creation, an economic creation—all this hate developed to secure the interest of some seventeenth-century dudes who wanted to get rich growing sugarcane and cotton, who wanted to make sure they’d always be the class on top. Which is to say, racism has always been about power. Which is to say, we invented racism. Which is to say, maybe we can learn to uninvent it, too. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

14 " What I’m saying is that a white person’s skin color isn’t the thing contributing to holding them back, and that for all black people, their skin color contributes to what’s hard about their lives no matter what other privileges they might enjoy. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

15 " The simple version is that an ally is a person from an empowered group who acts to help an oppressed group, even if it costs them the benefits of their power. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

16 " Cultural appropriation happens when members of a dominant group—in the United States, white people—take elements from the culture of a people who are disempowered. It’s problematic for a number of reasons. For one, it trivializes historic oppression. It also lets people show love for a culture while still remaining prejudiced toward the people of the culture and lets privileged people profit from the labor of oppressed people. On top of that, it can perpetuate racist stereotypes. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

17 " white privilege is about the word white, not rich. It’s having advantage built into your life. It’s not saying your life hasn’t been hard; it’s saying your skin color hasn’t contributed to the difficulty in your life. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

18 " For almost a century, black people were not allowed to legally vote, even as their bodies (three-fifths each) were used to beef up the Southern vote. Then they get the legal right to vote, only to face all kinds of nefarious tactics to keep them from it. They then face a justice system not of their peers but white people (in 2017, 71 percent of U.S. district court judges were white), who send them to prison far more often than white people. Once freed, they face yet more obstacles to vote. Should they somehow vote by accident, they face more prison—and should they not vote, well, they have little means of changing the laws and those who make them. A lose-lose situation, whichever way you look at it. That, brothers and sisters, is the nature of the Fix. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

19 " Imagine the worst insult you’ve ever received. Now imagine that when you heard those words, what you also heard was that you’re second-class forever. That you don’t deserve any of this American dream. Imagine what you heard was: You’re an animal. Imagine you heard, You’re stupid. You’re a slave. My people owned your people, and you were better off when they did. Imagine that you heard, You won’t amount to anything, boy. And the nothing you get is exactly what you deserve. If you can picture one word communicating all of that, then you’ll have some sense of what hearing the N-word does to me and any other black person in America. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

20 " Our democracy is supposed to be fair and impartial, but the truth is that both Republicans and Democrats engage the Fix to some degree. "

― , Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man