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Quote by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

“Most American see inequality – and the racial habits that give it life – as aberrations, ways we fail to live up to the idea of America. But we’re wrong. Inequality and racial habits are part of the American Idea. They are not just a symptom of bad, racist people who fail to live up to pristine ideals. We are, in the end, what we do. And this is the society we have all made. So much so that we can have a black man in the White House and nearly one million black men and women in the Big House.”

Quote by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

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Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

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“I recognized that the racialized liberalism in which I was educated--where we strive for a bigger part of some mythological pie that our fractured identities are in competition for--leaves us without a language with which to talk about inequality. It leaves black and white in perpetual opposition, a state that feeds the plantation mentality.”

IdentityEqualityInequalityHierarchyMeritocracyIdentity PoliticsRacialization
Book:Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging
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“The level of advocacy on behalf of others is a rarity -- and sorely needed. The work of equality is the labour not of the few but the many, including those who have benefited and continue to benefit the most from an unequal system. Change that must take place on a broad social scale must be just that -- broadly social. Everyone has their part to play. But it is not for advocates to occupy spaces intended for the very people they are fighting for.”

EqualityInequalitySocial ChangeAdvocacyAffinity Groups
Book:Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling
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“Now, the only song a woman knows is the song she learns at birth, a sorrowin’ song, with the words all wrong, in the many tongues of Earth. The things a woman wants to say, the tales she longs to tell . . . they take all day in the tongues of Earth, and half of the night as well. So nobody listens to what a woman says, except the men of power who sit and listen right willingly, at a hundred dollars an hour . . . sayin’ “Who on Earth would want to talk about such foolish things?” Oh, the tongues of Earth don’t lend themselves to the songs a woman sings! There’s a whole lot more to a womansong, a whole lot more to learn; but the words aren’t there in the tongues of Earth, and there’s noplace else to turn. . . . So the woman they talk, and the men they laugh, and there’s little a woman can say, but a sorrowin’ song with the words all wrong, and a hurt that won’t go away. The women go workin’ the manly tongues, in the craft of makin’ do, but the women that stammer, they’re everywhere, and the wellspoken ones are few. . . . ’Cause the only song a woman knows is the song she learns at birth; a sorrowin’ song with the words all wrong, in the manly tongues of Earth. (a 20th century ballad, set to an even older tune called “House of the Rising Sun”; this later form was known simply as “Sorrowin’ Song, With the Words All Wrong”)”

LanguageWomenFeminismInequalityLinguistics
Book:Native Tongue
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