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Quote by Kelly Oxford

“I'm not a big note-taker, so I think that the way I decide is that whatever I remember I always consider something that's important. If I remember a joke then I know it's a good joke, if I remember a story then I know it's a good story, and so that's how I curate what stories I'm going to write for the book. And I go over them again, make sure there's a theme and all that stuff, but mostly, it is intuition.”

Quote by Kelly Oxford

Author

Kelly Oxford
Kelly Oxford

Kelly Oxford, born in 1977, is an accomplished American author known for her humorous and introspective writing. Her works focus on personal experiences, social phenomena, and women's issues, gaining popularity across various platforms including The New York Times and The New Yorker. more

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“Generally the impulse to find justice through punitive measures can be a kind of quicksand. What James Whitman, the scholar I cite in the chapter of my book, talks about as an urge to level down, I think you see that everywhere. We're going to be a punitive society, so we might as well level out that punitiveness. Bankers and college swim stars and everyone face that same kind of wrath.”

“The desire to punish is a desire that emanates from a place of equality and justice. The lesson I feel that we have to confront is that that impulse is so easily transmuted into something corrosive and corrupt in how it's actually put into practice. That's the danger. It's not that the impulse is wrong or unjust or not totally righteous. It's that the ways in which the system that operates, the system that we've constructed tends to not deliver the promise of equity we might want, when we look to the system to provide it.”

“We have different expectations for different groups of people. We tend to modulate the degree with which we're forgiving or punitive depending on how well we know folks, or how much we consider them peers, or how much social capital we've invested in them. That has to do with race, class, gender, and socioeconomic status. We have a tendency to bend over backwards to forgive folks we think of as part of "the us." The question of who we define as "the us" is a lot of what constitutes how we punish who we punish.”

“The issue of the American justice system is so much broader than any one party, or any area of the country, or any one policy, because the totality of it is that it's driven by the underlying politics. The underlying politics are white fear and wrath and punishment. And that's what tends to be consistent. As I say in the book, that's the magnet that's drawing the iron filings into alignment. That's the thing that's powering all of it. The gravitational pole of those politics operate on each of these disparate little actors.”

“The central question for American politics right now is how did the country that elected Barack Obama elect Donald Trump. There's a lot to what Ta-Nehisi says about the racial reaction and backlash. And the power and the force and ultimately the success. The man who was selling this racist conspiracy theory about the first black President's birth: that's what launched him into a political career that ended up getting him elected the President of the United States. That is an absolutely remarkable fact.”