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Quote by Alysha Speer

“I choose to write because it's perfect for me. It's an escape, a place I can go to hide. It's a friend, when I feel out casted from everyone else. It's a journal, when the only story I can tell is my own. It's a book, when I need to be somewhere else. It's control, when I feel so out of control. It's healing, when everything seems pretty messed up. And it's fun, when life is just flat-out boring.”

Quote by Alysha Speer

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Alysha Speer

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“When I was a child, no one ever said the words "institutionalized racism." We hardly even said the word "racism." I don't think I took a single class in college that talked about the physiological effects of years of personally medicated racism and internalized racism. This was before studies came out that showed that black women were four times more likely to die from childbirth, before people were talking about epigenetics and whether or not trauma was heritable. If those studies were out there, I never read them. If those classes were offered, I never took them. There was little interest in these ideas back then because there was, there *is,* little interest in the lives of black people. What I'm saying is I didn't grow up with a language for, a way to explain, to parse out, my self-loathing. I grew up only with my part, my little throbbing stone of self-hate that I carried around with me to church, to school, to all those places in my life that worked, it seemed to me then, to affirm the idea that I was irreparably, fatally, wrong. I was a child who liked to be right.”

RacismSelf LoathingInstitutionalized Racism
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“I walked around those places, pious child that i was, thinking that my goodness was proof negative. "Look at me!" I wanted to shout. I wanted to be a living theorem, a Logos. Science and math had already taught me that if there was many exceptions to a rule, then the rule was not a rule. Look at me. This was all so wrongheaded, so backward, but I didn't know how to think any differently. The rule was never a rule, but I had mistaken it for one. I took me years of questioning and seeking to see more than my little piece, and even now I don't always see it.”

RacismContradictionsInstitutionalized Racism
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