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Punching the Air

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Yusef Salaam

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“We live in a society where race is one of the biggest indicators of your success in life. There are sizable racial divides in wealth, health, life expectancy, infant mortality, incarceration rates, and so much more. We cannot look at a society where racial inequality is so universal and longstanding and say, 'This is all the doing of a few individuals with hate in their hearts.' It just doesn't make sense.”

RacismBlack Lives MatterRace And Racism In AmericaBlmPeople Of Color
Book:So You Want to Talk About Race
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“In order to prevent chronic discomfort, Whites may learn not to notice. But in not noticing, one loses opportunities for greater insight into oneself and one's experience. A significant dimension of who one is in the world, one's Whiteness, remains uninvestigated and perceptions of daily experience are routinely distorted. Privilege goes unnoticed, and all but the most blatant acts of racial bigotry are ignored. Not noticing requires energy.”

RacismBlack Lives MatterRace And Racism In AmericaWhite PrivilegeBlm
Book:Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
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“A white police officer had entered a black women's home without a warrant, searching for a suspect. When she protested, he beat and arrested her, dragging her from her home though she wasn't fully dressed. When a black soldier saw this and tried to intervene to defend the woman, the white policeman pistol-whipped the black soldier, seriously injuring him. The men of the beaten soldier's regiment, learning no consequences would befall the white policeman, felt abandoned by white police and army officials. They saw the abuse as a last straw in a long string of injustices. So the marched into the city. Soldiers and civilians died in the shooting that followed”

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Book:Lovely War
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“Cultural racism—the cultural images and messages that affirm the assumed superiority of Whites and the assumed inferiority of people of color—is like smog in the air. Some days it is so thick it is visible, other times it is less apparent, but always, day in and day out, we are breathing it in.”

RacismBlack Lives MatterBlmRace In America
Book:Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
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“We know how you all want us to cancel black people when they do something bad, but you keep making excuses for people you revere. People say, “can’t we just draw the line at rapists and murderers?” But for us history is rife with horrible men and then we’ve learned that we have to sing praises to those horrible men, and we see them on our money and their names on our schools and our bridges. So horrible man is not a disqualifier. Our lives are imbued with them. When they ask us about Michael Jackson (how can you sing those songs?) and R Kelly; it’s complicated. I will get rid of Michael Jackson when you get rid of Andrew Jackson. At least you can dance to Beat It. But our stories are so full of irredeemably horrible people that it’s something we can compartmentalize. Literally, if Bill Cosby was a priest, he wouldn’t be in prison.”

RacismBlack Lives MatterBlack HistoryBlmCancel CultureAndrew JacksonMichael JacksonBill Cosby
Book:Surrender, White People!: Our Unconditional Terms for Peace
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“The more intense this hegemonic process of forced integration and integral reality is, the more singularities will rise against it. There will be more "rogue states" - states (like Iran, Palestine) that deliberately exclude themselves from the international community without waiting to be excluded, that exclude themselves from the universal and play their own game, at their own risk and peril. There will be more "rogue events" and more refusal of society by individuals. One could say, inverting Holderlin, that "Where Good grows, there grows the Genie of Evil," ("Da, wo des Gute wiichst, wiichst auch der Genius des Bosen"). This more or less clandestine insurrection of antagonistic forces against the integrist violence of the system is less an effect of the mind, the will or even the desire of human beings than the evil genius of the world itself in refusing globalization. To find the only adversary who will face this allpowerful hegemony, we must look for those beings that are strangers to will, exiled from dialogue and representation, exiled from knowledge and history.”

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Book:The Agony of Power
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