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Quote by Robin DiAngelo

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What Does It Mean to Be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy

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Robin DiAngelo

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“Racism is a philosophy based on a contempt for life. It is the arrogant assertion that one race is the center of value and object of devotion, before which other races must kneel in submission. It is the absurd dogma that one race is responsible for all the progress of history and alone can assure the progress of the future. Racism is total estrangement. It separates not only bodies, but minds and spirits. Inevitably it descends to inflicting spiritual or physical homicide upon the out-group.”

RaceRacismMartin Luther King JrRace Relations In America
Book:Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
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“I was 18 wen I started driving I was 18 the first time I was pulled over. It was 2 AM on a Saturday The officer spilled his lights all over my rearview mirror, he splashed out of the car with his hand already on his weapon, and looked at me the way a tsunami looks at a beach house. Immediately, I could tell he was the kind of man who brings a gun to a food fight. He called me son and I thought to myself, that's an interesting way of pronouncing "boy," He asks for my license and registration, wants to know what I'm doing in this nieghborhood, if the car is stolen, if I have any drugs and most days, I know how to grab my voice by the handle and swing it like a hammer. But instead, I picked it up like a shard of glass. Scared of what might happen if I didn't hold it carefully because I know that this much melanin and that uniform is a plotline to a film that can easily end with a chalk outline baptism, me trying to make a body bag look stylish for the camera and becoming the newest coat in a closet full of RIP hashtags. Once, a friend of a friend asked me why there aren't more black people in the X Games and I said, "You don't get it." Being black is one of the most extreme sports in America. We don't need to invent new ways of risking our lives because the old ones have been working for decades. Jim Crow may have left the nest, but our streets are still covered with its feathers. Being black in America is knowing there's a thin line between a traffic stop and the cemetery, it's the way my body tenses up when I hear a police siren in a song, it's the quiver in my stomach when a cop car is behind me, it's the sigh of relief when I turn right and he doesn't. I don't need to go volcano surfing. Hell, I have an adrenaline rush every time an officer drives right past without pulling me over and I realize I'm going to make it home safe. This time.”

PoetryPoemsRace And Racism In AmericaRace Relations In America
Book:Helium
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“In principle, it was easy to support the civil rights movement in Mississippi or Washington or on the streets of Detroit. Of course, it was right. But feeling- now, there's a war zone full of land mines which could blow to smithereens any right-thinking individual. And that of course is the territory of race.”

RaceRace Relations In America
Book:Skin Deep: Black Women & White Women Write About Race
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“Lynchings in the past have significantly shaped race relations in the present. A killing such as George Floyd’s lands on black people with a much heavier psychological weight because of lynching’s legacy. Too many white people fail to recognize this, and that needs to change. The hurt is too great, the simmering fear and anger too volatile, to bury forever. All Americans who would seek or demand a nation that is fairer to every citizen, less racist, and more peaceful have a responsibility to know this history in detail. … Confronting this ugliness would be difficult for everyone, of course, but it should be attempted. Ignorance and denial certainly have not worked, because this American wound still bleeds.” -- “Why White America Must Learn the History of Lynching”, Skeptical Inquirer (December 2020)”

RaceRacismRacism In AmericaRacial PrejudiceRace Relations In AmericaLynchings
Author:Guy P. Harrison
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“We’ve given up on rehabilitation, education, and services for the imprisoned because providing assistance to the incarcerated is apparently too kind and compassionate. We've institutionalized policies that reduce people to their worst acts and permanently label them "criminal," "murderer," "rapist," "thief," "drug dealer," "sex offender," "felon," - identities they cannot change regardless of the circumstances of their crimes or any improvements they might make in their lives.”

Capital PunishmentRacial Equity
Book:Just Mercy
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