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Quote by Abhijit Naskar

“A person wearing a hijab is more likely to be suspected as a terrorist than a person carrying a confederate flag, yet it is the confederate flag that poses a threat to society as a symbol of white supremacy, not the hijab.”

Quote by Abhijit Naskar

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Abhijit Naskar

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“There's no pride for me in my skin being white. I was born this way, I had no choice, I had no say. There was no test of worthiness before I was bestowed with white skin. My mom and dad were white, and they fucked, and their kid was white, so fucking what? And people say to me when I make this argument, "Well, what about cultural pride? You know, what about pride in where you came from, what about pride in your fucking pedigree?" Like I'm supposed to get all misty-eyed thinking about the accomplishments of the white race. "We invented wax paper! So beautiful! Hahaha!" No, Thomas Edison invented it, or knowing what a piece of shit he was, he probably stole it from some poor sap. But whoever invented wax paper, it wasn't me, I wasn't there. But let's say I did decide to take pride in that. Let's say I looked at the long history of what the white race had done and took it as my own and said, "Yeah, I'm part of this!" Well, in that case, then I probably SHOULD pay reparations to black people, right? Because if I'm going to own the accomplishments, I also have to own the fucking atrocities. But you know what? I don't want either. I want to be an individual, with my own drives, and convictions, and principles, not just a cultural unit, not just a series of superficial identity categorizations.”

IdentityRacismIndividualismWhite Nationalism
Author:T.J. Kirk
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“Prior to colonialism, black Africans seem to have found their blackness perfectly beautiful and normal, unsurprisingly. But also, by making whiteness the colour of oppression, the colour that defined a person’s right to own other human beings, to rape and kill and steal with impunity, white supremacists had paradoxically opened up the way for blackness to become the colour of freedom, of revolution and of humanity. This is why it’s absurd to compare black nationalism and white nationalism; not because black people are inherently moral, but because the projects of the two nationalisms were entirely different. This difference is why the black nationalist Muhammad Ali could still risk his life, give up the prime years of his career and lose millions of dollars in solidarity with the non-black, non-American people of Vietnam. It’s also why Ali could show as much sympathy as he did to the white people of Ireland in their quarrels with Britain, despite him saying, somewhat rhetorically, that 'The white man is the devil’.”

ColonialismWhite NationalismBlack Nationalism
Book:Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire
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“When you assume your nation needs no improvement, when you assume that your nation is at its absolute best, you are inadvertently burying your nation alive, for a nation that assumes self-proclaimed supremacy is the only inferior nation on earth.”

NationalismNaziWhite SupremacyNation BuildingNeonazisNationalistWhite NationalismNationalist FundamentalismNationalist ExtremismWhite Nationalist
Book:Generation Corazon: Nationalism is Terrorism
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“Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro's making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance.... Both races need to understand that their rights and duties are mutual and equal and their interests in the common good are idential.... There is no help or healing in apparaising past responsibilities or in present apportioning of praise or blame. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem--a magnanimous understanding by both races--is the first step toward its solution.”

RaceRace RelationsGreat MigrationIsabel Wilkerson
Book:The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
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“We are fragmented into so many different aspects. We don´t know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home. Meditation, then, is bringing the mind home.”

SpiritualityMeditationBuddhism
Book:The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
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“Sandra L. West and Aberjhani have compiled an encyclopedia that makes an important contribution to our need to know more about one of modern America’s truly significant artistic and cultural movements. It helps us to acknowledge the complexity of African American life at a time when the nation’s culture was taking on a recognizable shape, when race was becoming less of a crushing burden and more of a challenge to progressive people and their ideals, and when cities and their inhabitants symbolized the end of the past and the seductiveness of the new.”

African AmericansAuthorsRace RelationsUs HistoryDemographicsBlack History MonthAfrican American HistoryHistoriansHarlem RenaissanceGreat MigrationAberjhaniEncyclopediasHarlem Renaissance HistoriansCultural MovementsBooks On The Harlem RenaissanceClement Alexander PriceNewark HistorianSandra L West
Book:Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
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“Many years later, people would forget about the quiet successes of everyday people like Ida Mae. In the debates to come over welfare and pathology, American would overlook people like her in its fixation with the underclass, just as a teacher can get distracted by the two or three problem children at the expense of the quiet, obedient ones. Few experts trained their sights on the unseen masses of migrants like her, who worked from the moment they arrived, didn’t end up on welfare, stayed married because that’s what God-fearing people of their generation did whether they were happy or not, and managed not to get strung out on drugs or whiskey or a cast of nameless, no-count men.”

MigrationBlack History MonthGreat Migration
Book:The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
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“During the second half of the sixties, the center of the crisis shifted to the sprawling ghettos of the North. Here black experience was radically different from that in the South. The stability of institutional relationships was largely absent in Northern ghettos, especially among the poor. Over twenty years ago, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was able to see the brutalizing effect of urbanization upon lower class blacks : ". . . The bonds of sympathy and community of interests that held their parents together in the rural environment have been unable to withstand the disintegrating forces in the city." Southern blacks migrated North in search of work, seeking to become transformed from a peasantry into a working class. But instead of jobs they found only misery, and far from becoming a proletariat, they came to constitute a lumpenproletariat, an underclass of rejected people. Frazier's prophetic words resound today with terrifying precision: ". . . As long as the bankrupt system of Southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of Southern cities or make their way to Northern cities, where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity." Out of such conditions, social protest was to emerge in a form peculiar to the ghetto, a form which could never have taken root in the South except in such large cities as Atlanta or Houston. The evils in the North are not easy to understand and fight against, or at least not as easy as Jim Crow, and this has given the protest from the ghetto a special edge of frustration. There are few specific injustices, such as a segregated lunch counter, that offer both a clear object of protest and a good chance of victory. Indeed, the problem in the North is not one of social injustice so much as the results of institutional pathology. Each of the various institutions touching the lives of urban blacks—those relating to education, health, employment, housing, and crime—is in need of drastic reform. One might say that the Northern race problem has in good part become simply the problem of the American city—which is gradually becoming a reservation for the unwanted, most of whom are black.”

RaceSouthAfrican AmericansBlacksGhettoCity LifeUrban LifeNorthGreat Migration
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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