“My brownness turns out to be a form of queerness in and of itself and makes me too queer for gay men.”
Source: I'm Afraid of Men.
“If you're not white, you have to be brilliant, just to be considered acceptable.”
Source: Zoot Suit and Other Plays
“I feel ashamed that black people are both the agents and the victims of this chaos, and I don't want to be thought of like that. But I'm also ashamed of myself for thinking I'm somehow better. The shame I feel in my guts, pulsing, spiraling; but also everything feels very far away. I'm black, but my black is different from that of those rioters on TV.”
Source: The Black Kids
“while white women are an oppressed group, they still wield more power than any other group of women—including the power to oppress both men and women of color.”
Source: Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
“The sun rays reach your home; the book rays reach your mind.”
Source: Key for the Next Generation Growth: Author: Human composer of the God played new tune
“...lies...drive immigrants, and people of color...to change who we are in order to make us palatable, or at least tolerable, to white America. I didn't find freedom in assimilation because there is no freedom in racist ideas. Assimilation requires that the story we tell about the United States and about white people is an uplifting, inspiring, sugarcoated version of the facts, in which the whip, guns, and racist motives must remain hidden. But it was the truth about this country, the knowledge of its ugly dirty secrets, that set me free.”
Source: You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation
“White supremacy is persistent, but so are we.”
Source: You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation
“The legacy of unions that kept African Americans, Latinos, Chinese, and others out of factory work—redlining, exclusionary immigration policies, the looting of Mexicans' land during the Mexican-American War, deportations of Mexicans during economic downturns—all created a gap that we are still trying to close. In a country where Black Americans have been viewed as 'biologically inferior,' Mexicans as 'an ignorant "hybrid race,"' and Chinese immigrants as the 'ideal human mule,' there is far from a fair chance to access the same economic opportunities as white people.”
Source: You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation
“We are finally seeing that success doesn't have to happen outside our community or in spite of our heritage. We are rejecting the notion that success is found in whiteness because that kind of thinking has never led us anywhere good. The antidote for the poison of the oppressor is to embrace our brownness, because it is our culture that is propelling us.”
Source: You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation
“We learn that the United States is the pinnacle of democracy in the world, but how can freedom be made perfect when it was built upon the genocide of Indigenous people, the enslavement of Black people, and the colonization of Mexicans?”
Source: You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation