Category Archives: Antiracism

“The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

“We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

“Everybody can be great – because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Sometimes FaceBook can be good for finding more succinct ways of explaining intricate concepts. I appreciated the provocative impact of thought that this one instigated in my own beliefs:

400 years ago white men enslaved black people. And sold them. And treated them as less than human. For 250 years. While white men created the country’s laws and its systems of government. While 10, 15 generations of white families got to grow and flourish and make choices that could make their lives better.

And then 150 years ago white men “freed” black people from slavery. But then angry white men created laws that made it impossible for them to vote. Or to own land. Or to have the same rights as white people. And even erected monuments glorifying people who actively had fought to keep them enslaved. All while another 5, 10 generations of white families got to grow and accumulate wealth and gain land and get an education.

And then 60 years ago white people made it “legal” for black people to vote, and to be “free” from discrimination. But angry white people still fought to keep schools segregated. And closed off neighborhoods to white people only. And made it harder for black people to get bank loans, or get quality education or health care, or to (gasp) marry a white person. All while another 2-3 generations of white families got to grow and pass their wealth down to their children and their children’s children.

And then we entered an age where we had the technology to make PUBLIC the things that were already happening in private– the beatings, the stop and frisk laws, the unequal distribution of justice, the police brutality (in the south, police began as slave patrols designed to catch runaway slaves). And only now, after 400+ years and 20+ generations of a white head start, are we STARTING to truly have a dialogue about what it means to be black.

White privilege doesn’t mean you haven’t suffered or fought or worked hard. It doesn’t mean white people are responsible for the sins of our ancestors. It doesn’t mean you can’t be proud of who you are.

It DOES mean that we need to acknowledge that the system our ancestors created is built FOR white people.

It DOES mean that Black people are at a disadvantage because of the color of their skin, and

It DOES mean that we owe it to our neighbors– of all colors– to acknowledge that and work to make our world more equitable.

Saying ‘All Lives Matter’ is like yelling ‘I have a birthday, too!’ at someone else’s party.

Or screaming ‘Save All the Animals!’ at a ‘Save the Whales’ rally.

At best, it’s dumb.

At worst, it denigrates and seeks to deny the original point and message.

#BlackLivesMatter

“My parents told me in the very beginning as a young child when I raised the question about segregation and racial discrimination, they told me not to get in the way, not to get in trouble, not to make any noise.”

“We are one people with one family. We all live in the same house… and through books, through information, we must find a way to say to people that we must lay down the burden of hate. For hate is too heavy a burden to bear.”

“You have to tell the whole truth, the good and the bad, maybe some things that are uncomfortable for some people.”

“We need someone who will stand up and speak up and speak out for the people who need help, for people who are being discriminated against. And it doesn’t matter whether they are black or white, Latino, Asian or Native American, whether they are straight or gay, Muslim, Christian, or Jews.”

“There are still forces in America that want to divide us along racial lines, religious lines, sex, class. But we’ve come too far; we’ve made too much progress to stop or to pull back. We must go forward. And I believe we will get there.”

~ John Lewis

“We must also stop the hateful incendiary comments, we got to do it. Those in the highest levels of the government must stop invoking fear, using racist language and encouraging reprehensible behavior. It only creates more division among us and severely limits our ability to work together for the common good. As a country, we finally must say enough is enough. That we are done with the hateful rhetoric. That we are done with the mass shootings. That we are done with white supremacists, domestic terrorists, who terrorizing in our country and fighting against everything America stands for.” â€“ Elijah Cummings

“Diversity is an aspect of human existence that cannot be eradicated by terrorism or war or self-consuming hatred. It can only be conquered by recognizing and claiming the wealth of values it represents for all.” â€• Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

Being a good ally takes effort and work and understanding. We can all play a part, but it means we have to be brave, and sometimes bold. It may also mean confronting our own discomforts in ways that may require readjusting things that have been part of ourselves for decades. With all that 2020 has wrought, one of the silver linings may be a reckoning with our collective bias and the racism that is a product of growing up in America. It’s there within almost every single one of us, and the first step in eradicating it is examining and owning up to it. To have been raised in this country is to be unwittingly part of systemic racism in some form. When you realize that – when you realize it’s not your fault as long as you make a concerted effort to grow and change – it suddenly loses its shame, and you can find a greater integrity and honor by living an actively antiracist life. We have that choice in more ways and at more opportunities than we know.

Ahsante the Artist offers the following steps on how to be a good ally, which is a great place to begin.

• Listen and Educate yourself
• Uplift marginalized voices
• Speak up
• Respect safe spaces
• Get to work

I have a huge problem with people who write ‘All Lives Matter’ in response to or even in conjunction with ’Black Lives Matter.’ First of all, all lives won’t matter until Black Lives Matter. Second, that’s like responding to a ‘Save the Whales’ comment with ‘Save All The Animals’. It’s dumb and completely misses the point. As for the #BlackLivesMatter movement, it is very much needed, and will be for quite some time. History has shown it, and the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor continue to show it.

“People still get shot because of their color – people still get mistrusted because of their religion – people still get sneered at because of their gender and sexuality. Does this look like a civilized world? We may have the tangible brain capacity to build a civilized world, but we are not there yet, and we are not going to reach that destination any time soon. However, the work must begin now.” ― Abhijit Naskar

“We like to filter new information through our own experiences to see if it computes. If it matches up with what we have experiences, it’s valid. If it doesn’t match up, it’s not. But race is not a universal experience. If you are white, there is a good chance you may have been poor at some point in your life, you may have been sick, you may have been discriminated against for being fat or being disabled or being short or being conventionally unattractive, you may have been many things—but you have not been a person of color. So, when a person of color comes to you and says “this is different for me because I’m not white,” when you run the situation through your own lived experience, it often won’t compute. This is usually where the desire to dismiss claims of racial oppression come from—it just doesn’t make sense to you so it cannot be right.
But if you are white, and you are feeling this way, I ask you this: is your lived experience real? Are the situations you’ve lived through real? Are your interpretations of those situations valid?…So if your lived experience and your interpretation of that lived experience are valid, why wouldn’t the lived experience of people of color be just as valid? If I don’t have the right to deem your life, what you see and hear and feel, a lie, why do you have the right to do that to me? Why do you deserve to be believed and people of color don’t?” â€• Ijeoma Oluo

“The opposite of racist isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘anti-racist.’ What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an anti-racist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist.” â€• Ibram X. Kendi

“Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.” â€• Ibram X. Kendi

“I know that readers truly committed to racial equality will join me on this journey of interrogating and shedding our racist ideas. But if there is anything I have learned during my research, it’s that the principal producers and defenders of racist ideas will not join us. And no logic or fact or history book can change them, because logic and facts and scholarship have little to do with why they are expressing racist ideas in the first place.” â€• Ibram X. Kendi