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Quote by Rachel H. White

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In the Shadow of Downtown 1-6, Roots of Disunion but Shadows of Exodus: a new adult post-apocalyptic dark fantasy serial novel, collection 1

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Rachel H. White

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“Anyone can be made to feel like an outsider. It’s up to the people who have the power to exclude. Often it’s on the basis of race. Depending on a culture’s fears and biases, Jews can be treated as outsiders. Muslims can be treated as outsiders. Christians can be treated as outsiders. The poor are always outsiders. The sick are often outsiders. People with disabilities can be treated as outsiders. Members of the LGBTQ community can be treated as outsiders. Immigrants are almost always outsiders. And in most every society, women can be made to feel like outsiders—even in their own homes. Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to the margins people who trigger in us the feelings we want to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and sick and poor people on the margins of society. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we’re most afraid we will find in ourselves—and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves. This is what drives dominant groups to push different racial and religious groups to the margins. And we’re often not honest about what’s happening. If we’re on the inside and see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves, “I’m not in that situation because I’m different. But that’s just pride talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don’t like to confess what we have in common with outsiders because it’s too humbling. It suggests that maybe success and failure aren’t entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to be humble, and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say, “I’m no better than others.” So instead we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We say it’s about merit or tradition when it’s really just protecting our privilege and our pride.”

OutsidersInsidersPrivilegeleged
Book:The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World
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“My stomach gave a violent start and turned into a hunk of ice. The world was spinning around me, and blobs of faces and visions of things past were dancing in the red mist that covered the lot. It swirled into a mass of colors and I felt myself swaying on my feet. Someone cried, "Glory, look at the kid!" And the ground rushed up to meet me very suddenly.”

OutsidersSpinningTheColorsHinton
Book:追逐金色的少年 [Zhui zhu jin se de shao nian] / The Outsiders
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“Some of us feel as if we’re outsiders. People occasionally talk about us in hushed tones, whispering that we’re a bit of a lone wolf, or at times a loose cannon. They don’t want to say it to our faces because every now and again we can be a little bit unpredictable. But they look at us with a strange curiosity, because in comparison – although they’re often very successful at ‘fitting in’ – they lead lives that are drab, dreary and monotonous. They’re not unruly like the Carefree Scamps. We have a divine spark of unruliness within us. And it’s that unruliness which has kept us young.”

OutsidersAgeingUnrulyAgeing WellUnruliness
Book:Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe
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“His sadistic attitude is allied with a desire for self-abasement which in my opinion constitutes the very foundation of his character: he knows that it is dangerous to stand out and that his behavior irritates society, but nevertheless he seeks and attracts persecution and scandal. It is the only way he can establish a more vital relationship with the society he is antagonizing. As a victim, he can occupy a place in the world that previously ignored him; as a delinquent, he can become one of its wicked heroes… [He] is impassive and contemptuous, allowing all these contradictory impressions to accumulate around him until finally, with a certain painful satisfaction, he sees them explode into a tavern fight or a raid by the police or a riot. And then, in suffering persecution, he becomes his true self, his supremely naked self, as a pariah, a man who belongs nowhere. The circle that began with provocation has completed itself and he is ready now for redemption, for his entrance into the society that rejected him.”

ViolenceRacismMexicoOutsidersStereotypesPariah
Book:The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings
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