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Quote by Reem Gaafar

“She had never spoken that way with her cousin before, or with any other male member of her family or community. This wasn’t the kind of village where girls spoke freely in the presence of men. It wasn’t even the kind of village where girls and women walked in public with men; the small back alleys and streets that lined the houses were how they got about, staying out of the men’s way as much as possible.”

Quote by Reem Gaafar

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A Mouth Full of Salt

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Reem Gaafar

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“They begin to perceive that ours is a world where the notion that some people are less important than others has been allowed to take root, and grow until it buckles and cracks the foundations of our humanity. “How could they?” the gleaners exclaim, of us. “Why would they do such things? How can they just leave those people to starve? Why do they not listen when that one complains of disrespect? What does it mean that these ones have been assaulted and no one, no one, cares? Who treats other people like that?”

“Culture' is, in sum, at an historical turning point. Emerging in the late nineteenth century as an abstract analytical and political concept, explicitly associated with concepts of inequality, and still now a useful component in the production and reproduction of state power, it seems to be increasingly shaken loose from its rootedness in the state, as difference comes to be directly produced by the policies and practices of state, without invoking culture.”

“Microaggressions are not trivial and insignificant but have a continuing and oftentimes harmful macro impact. Those in the majority group, those with power and privilege, and those who do not experience microaggressions are privileged to enjoy the luxury of availing for proof. Meanwhile, people of color, LGBTQ brothers and sisters, and other socially devalued groups continue to be harmed and oppressed. To ask them to wait for individual, institutional, and societal change is to ask them to continue to suffer in silence and to maintain the status quo of power and privilege.”

“For reasons that have less to do with an abstraction like white supremacy than with the dynamics of a political and economic regime that concentrates benefits at the top at the expense of everyone else, black New Orleanians are disproportionately–but by no means exclusively–likely to occupy the ranks of the dispossessed under that regime. And the terms on which the white supremacist past has been acknowledged and repudiated actually obscure the sources of inequality and dispossession today. While the segregationist system was clearly and obviously racist and white supremacist, it wasn't merely about white supremacy for its own sake alone. It was the instrument of a specific order of political and economic power that was clearly racial but that most fundamentally stabilized and reinforced the dominance of powerful political and economic interests. White supremacy was and remains an ideology, and a very abstract one at that, and because it's so abstract–its basic premises and categories are fantasies–its practical warrants are always improvised.”