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Quote by Johny Pitts

“For most black people in Europe, the battle against prejudice is for life, which is why you have to pace yourself to run a marathon instead of exerting all your energy in a spring if you want to survive — you can’t be throwing beer bottles at police and telling them to fuck themselves simply for the fun of it.”

Quote by Johny Pitts

Book:Afropean: Notes from Black Europe
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Afropean: Notes from Black Europe

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Johny Pitts

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“Racism has permeated psychology and psychiatry from its genesis. Early clinicians came from white, European backgrounds, and used their culture's social norms as the basis for what being healthy looked like. It was a very narrow and oppressive definition, which assumed that being genteel, well-dressed, well-read, and white were the marks of humanity, and that anyone who deviated from that standard was not a person, but an animal in need of being tamed.”

RacismPrejudiceOppressionBiasAutismPsychiatryBlacknessWhitenessNeurodiversity
Book:Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity
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“While in college I was a member of the Black Panther Party, defunct as it was, mainly because I felt I had to prove I was black enough. Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I am not black enough. Some people whom the society calls white tell me the same thing. I have heard this mainly about my novels, from editors who have rejected me and reviewers whom I have apparently confused and, on a couple of occasions, on a basketball court when upon missing a shot I muttered Egads.”

IdentityAfrican AmericansBlacksBlacknessBeing Black
Book:Erasure
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“Many black intellectuals spoke about the experience of racism mainly, and sometimes exclusively, from a black male perspective, highlighting the various ways their humanity had been degraded and denied. While this discussion was something I cared about deeply, it was rarely balanced with one about all the unique ways in which black women have suffered. Even the scholars who spoke about race without focusing so much on the particular experience of black men still failed to fully capture and dissect the compounded challenges black women faced as they dealt with racism and sexism. The result of discussions of race being unfairly tilted toward the male point of view is that the experiences of black women have taken a backseat to those of black men, although they've suffered in ways that black men haven't. Racism and sexism were stacked against them. And too often they've borne the brunt of the very masculinity that has been historically debased in black men when black men asserted their power over the only people they could - black women...The hard truth is that black men have contributed to these struggles both subtly and overtly...we contribute to the degradation of black women by glorifying the kind of common rap that reduces them to bitches, hoes, and body parts.”

SexismBlack WomenBlacknessIntersectionalityBipocIntersectional FeminismBlack Experience
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“That morning, like every morning, the first decision he made regarded his Blackness. His skin was a deep, constant brown. In public, when people could actually see him, it was impossible to get his Blackness down to anywhere near a 1.5. If he wore a tie, wing-tipped shoes, smiled constantly, used his indoor voice, and kept his hands strapped and calm at his sides, he could get his Blackness as low as 4.0.”

African AmericansBlacksBlacknessBlack Men
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“I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was,” says Paul D. So, what is the being of blackness? Ultimately, (anti)blackness appears to be a matrix: a mold, a womb, a binding substance, a network of intersections, functioning as an encoder or decoder. It is an essential enabling condition for something of, but distinguishable from, its source—and therefore, it performs a kind of natality, performing a generative function rather than serving as an identity. If (anti)blackness is a matrix, then the normative conception of “the human” and the entire set of arrangements Sweet Home allegorizes have their source in abject blackness. In the process of distinguishing itself from blackness, normative humanity nevertheless bears the shadowy traces of blackness’s abject generativity. As “the defined” rather than the “definers,” the enslaved’s abjection places blackness under the sign of the feminine, the object, matter, and the animal regardless of sex.”

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“When I rebelled, even here in the ‘enlightened’ twenty-first century, I was lumbered with with the feeling that I was rebelling on the behalf on an entire people, and when I refrained from rebelling it was to challenge the opinion that I was proof of a black problem; acts of resistance considered fair game when enacted by white people assume a dangerous radical hue in the eyes of Western society when carried out by blacks. In essence, I wasn’t comfortable enough in my own skin in this Antifa stuff, partly because I felt the colour of that skin carried its own surplus surreality in the surroundings i grew up in; I could be wearing an Oxford shirt and chinos and driving a Toyota Prius, and still be enough of an outsider.”

ResistanceBlacknessAfropean
Author:Johny Pitts
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