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All Boys Aren't Blue QUOTES

All Boys Aren't Blue QUOTES

1 " I think the funniest part about that argument is that it doesn't matter if your queerness is by birth or by choice. It is who you are, and no one should have the right to change that. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

2 " Gender is one of the biggest projections placed onto children at birth- despite families having no idea how the baby will truly turn out. "

― George M. Johnson, , All Boys Aren't Blue

3 " I often wonder what this world would look like if people were simply told, "You are having a baby with a penis, or a vagina, or other genitalia."

What if parents were also given instructions to nurture their baby by paying attention to what the child naturally gravitates toward, and to simply feed those interests? What if parents let their children explore their own gender instead of pushing them down one of the only two roads society tells us exist? "

― George M. Johnson, , All Boys Aren't Blue

4 " When people ask me how I got into activism, I often say, “The first person you are ever an activist for is yourself.” If I wasn’t gonna fight for me, who else was? "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

5 " Navigating in a space that questions your humanity isn’t really living at all. It’s existing. We all deserve more than just the ability to exist. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

6 " Symbolism gives folks hope. But I’ve come to learn that symbolism is a threat to actual change—it’s a chance for those in power to say, “Look how far you have come” rather than admitting, “Look how long we’ve stopped you from getting here. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

7 " You sometimes don’t know you exist until you realize someone like you existed before. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

8 " many of us connect with each other through trauma and pain: broken people finding other broken people in the hopes of fixing one another. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

9 " You’ll find that people often use the excuse “it was the norm” when discussing racism, homophobia, and anything else in our history they are trying to absolve themselves of. Saying that something was “a norm” of the past is a way not to have to deal with its ripple effects in the present. It removes the fact that hate doesn’t just stop because a law or the time changed. Folks use this excuse because they are often unwilling to accept how full of phobias and -isms they are themselves—or at least how they benefit from social structures that privilege them. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

10 " Love who you want to love, and do it unapologetically, including that face you see every day in the mirror. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

11 " I believe that the dominant society establishes an idea of what “normal” is simply to suppress differences, which means that any of us who fall outside of their “normal” will eventually be oppressed. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

12 " Your name is one of the most important pieces of your identity. It is the thing that you own. It is attached to every piece of work that you put into the world. Your name holds power when you walk into a room. No two people with the same name are the same person. It’s important that, like everything else you grow to love in life, your name is something you appreciate as well. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

13 " Find a flaw, deficit, or disadvantage in our community, and I can find a system that oppressed us and made it that way. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

14 " American history is truly the greatest fable ever written. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

15 " The greatest tool you have in fighting the oppression of your Blackness and queerness and anything else within your identity is to be fully educated on it.

Knowledge is truly your sharpest weapon in a world hell-bent on telling you stories that are simply not true. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

16 " The first person you are ever an activist for is yourself. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

17 " But I’ve come to learn that symbolism is a threat to actual change—it’s a chance for those in power to say, “Look how far you have come” rather than admitting, “Look how long we’ve stopped you from getting here. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

18 " I often think about a statement Viola Davis made when she won her first Oscar. Something along the lines of encouraging people to go to the graveyard and dig up all the dead bodies in order to hear and tell the stories of those whose dreams were never realized. Those are the stories she’s interested in telling. Although that is valid, I must challenge it. This book is proof positive that you don’t need to go to the graveyard to find us.

Many of us are still here. Still living and waiting for our stories to be told—to tell them ourselves. We are the living that have always been here but have been erased. We are the sons and brothers, daughters and sisters, and others that never get a chance to see ourselves nor to raise our voices to ears that need to hear them. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

19 " The boy who had struggled to find friends for so long finally had a whole group of people he could call his brothers. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue

20 " Anytime I’m dealing with something personally, I look to see which ancestor before me already discussed it. I don’t let their work dictate my every action, but I know that I am in a much better postion when I am informed by their work. I use my history as a tool to fight against my marginalization. "

― , All Boys Aren't Blue