Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Zadie Smith

Quote by Zadie Smith

“... the truth is that not enough carriers of this virus have ever been willing to risk the potential loss of any aspect of their social capital to find out what kind of America might lie on the other side of segregation. They are very happy to "blackout" their social media for a day, to read all-black books, and "educate" themselves about black issues—as long as this education does not occur in the form of actual black children attending their actual schools.”

Quote by Zadie Smith

Book:Intimations
Create image

Work

Intimations

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith is a British novelist known for her distinctive literary style and profound social insights. Her works cover a range of themes including race, class, gender, and identity, and have been widely appreciated by readers. more

You May Also Like

“Since the mirror of gentrification is representation in popular culture, increasingly only the gentrified get their stories told in mass ways. They look in the mirror and think it's a window, believing that corporate support for and inflation of their story is in fact a neutral and accurate picture of the world. If all art, politics, entertainment, relationships, and conversations must maintain that what is constructed and imposed by force is actually natural and neutral, then the gentrified mind is a very fragile parasite.”

New YorkAidsLgbtWhite SupremacyGentrification
Book:The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination
Create image

“There is no there there,” he says in a kind of whisper, with this goofy openmouthed smile Dene wants to punch. Dene wants to tell him he’d looked up the quote in its original context, in her Everybody’s Autobiography, and found that she was talking about how the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore.”

OaklandGentrificationThere There
Book:There There
Create image

“The end result is that the United States is today a more segregated country in many respects than it was twenty years ago. Problems of education, transportation to jobs and decent living conditions are all made difficult because housing is so rigidly segregated. The expansion of suburbia and migration from the South have worsened big-city segregation. The suburbs are white nooses around the black necks of the cities. Housing deteriorates in central cities; urban renewal has been Negro removal and has benefited big merchants and real estate interests; and suburbs expand with little regard for what happens to the rest of America.”

CitiesHousingSegregationSuburbsGentrificationUrban RenewalSegregated Housing
Book:Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
Create image

“Apart from their role in destroying those organizing for progressive social change, the police are and have always been central to protecting private concentrations of wealth through selective enforcement of the law; gentrification, unlawful redlining; evictions; immigration enforcement and the management of migrants fleeing the effects of global U.S. policy; civil forfeiture; and many other forms of exclusion and predation. And they are preparing to play a central role in the enforcement of anti-democratic voter restriction laws sweeping the country, as well as laws banning books from libraries and anti-trans laws.”

CensorshipPolice BrutalityGentrificationCopagandaThe Mafia In BlueRedliningEvictionsPolice Supression
Book:Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
Create image