Quote of the Day

Beloved, Donald Trump is what we are left with when whiteness drains the body politic of crucial self-awareness and we stiffen into a moral corpse.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 220

Quote of the Day

I hoped that my candidacy -- and if things worked out, my presidency -- would be viewed as the next chapter in the long progressive struggle to make the country fairer, freer, and stronger, and to beat back a seriously scary right-wing agenda.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 77

Quote of the Day

Empathy must be cultivated.  The practice of empathy means taking a moment to imagine how you might behave if you were in our positions.  Do not tell us how we should act if we were you; imagine how you would act if you were us.  Imagine living in a society where your white skin marks you for disgust, hate, and fear.  Imagine that for many moments.  Only when you see black folk as we are, and imagine yourselves as we have to live our lives, only then will the suffering stop, the hurt cease, the pain go away.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 212

Quote of the Day

I was also acutely aware that, as the first woman to be a credible candidate for President, I looked and sounded different than any presidential candidate in our country's history.  I had no precedent to follow, and voters had no historical frame of reference to draw upon.  It was exhilarating to enter uncharted territory.  But uncharted, by definition, means uncertain.  If I felt that way, I was sure that a lot of voters would feel even more wary about it.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 76-77

Quote of the Day

Whiteness must shed its posture of competence, its will to omniscience, its belief in its goodness and purity, and then walk a mile or two in the boots of blackness.  The siege of hate will not end until white folk imagine themselves as black folk -- vulnerable despite our virtues.  If enough of you, one by one, exercises your civic imagination, and puts yourself in the shoes of your black brothers and sisters, you might develop a democratic impatience for injustice, for the cruel disregard of black life, for the careless indifference to our plight.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 211-212

Quote of the Day

I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions, while Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stoked Americans' anger and resentment.  I was giving speeches laying out how to solve the country's problems.  He was ranting on Twitter.  Democrats were playing by the rules and trying too hard not to offend the political press.  Republicans were chucking the rule book out the window and working the refs as hard as they could.  I may have won millions more votes, but he's the one sitting in the Oval Office.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 76

Quote of the Day

Black immigrants often have a leg up on American blacks as well.  They have arrived from societies where they enjoyed equality without regard to color.  Thus they arrive with great assets, skills, and experiences, allowing them to compete in the American marketplace.  These black immigrants faced no color barriers to human capital like those we face in America.  Neither can we discount the exotic appeal of foreign blackness.  Many white folk find it far more attractive to deal with a black person from the Caribbean or Africa than American blacks.  Foreign blacks lack the common history of oppression that binds black Americans together.  That difference is a big one for white folk.  You don't feel the sort of pressure of history when you encounter many of those immigrant blacks.  Neither do you feel the sort of white racial guilt you may experience in the presence of American blacks.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 209

Quote of the Day

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live.  Life is no "brief candle" to me.  It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

-- George Bernard Shaw

Quote of the Day

I have in mind the argument that black folk should do like the European immigrants who came to America and worked hard to become successful.  The best response to such a baseless comparison is a direct one: whiteness matters.  My friends, in the short term, and in the long run, too, being Irish, or Italian, or Polish, or Jewish hasn't been as large a deficit to achievement as color has been for black folk.  It is true that the barriers of language, ethnicity, and culture are big ones, but they don't make the same difference that being black makes.  White immigrants came to this country, and still do, with white skin, the biggest asset possible in a country where whiteness still has tremendous value.  It makes no sense to tell black folk to do what white immigrants did to become successful.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 208-209

Quote of the Day

When people start believing that all politicians are liars and crooks, the truly corrupt escape scrutiny, and cynicism grows.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 47

Quote of the Day

Beloved, your voices are crucial because the doubt of black humanity, the skepticism of black intelligence, and the denial of the worth of black bodies linger in our cultural unconscious and shadow our national politics.  If you challenge white ignorance, or indifference, to the plight of people of color, it will lend our cause needed legitimacy.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 208

Quote of the Day

For Trump, if everyone's down in the mud with him, then he's no dirtier than anyone else.  He doesn't have to do better if everyone else does worse.  I think that's why he seems to relish humiliating people around him.  

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 47

Quote of the Day

The more black folk you know, the less likely you are to stereotype us.  The less you stereotype us, the less likely you are to fear us.  The less you fear us, the less likely you are to want to hurt us, or to accept our hurt as the price of your safekeeping.  The safer you feel, the safer we'll be.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 207

Quote of the Day

For us, there is only the trying.  The rest is not our business.

-- T. S. Eliot

Quote of the Day

Whether one like or loathed Barack Obama's politics, there is no denying that he is one of the most profound, impressive, gifted, and inspiring Americans this nation has seen in quite some time.  And yet there was a relentless attempt to make him the "other."  The collective effort to deprive Obama of his legitimacy, of his citizenship, of his humanity, scarred the body politic and did great damage to our efforts to move this county beyond its heinous racial history.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 206

Quote of the Day

A two-dimensional cartoon is easier to digest than a fully formed person.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 46

Quote of the Day

Beloved, racism and bigotry are ugly, uncomfortable issues to grapple with.  But if you don't address them, you reinforce the privilege of not having to face up to the truth.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 204

Quote of the Day

Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway.  You'll be "damned if you do and damned if you don't."

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Quote of the Day

If white folk refuse to name white privilege for what it is, then it is more likely that you will ignore how black inequality, black suffering, exists all around you.  Those of you who know better than that must tell other white people what you know.  As on of my students says, "if one stays silent" then one is "actually helping racial injustice persist."

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 204

Quote of the Day

No woman had ever won the nomination of a major party in the history of our country, let alone the presidency.  It's easy to lose sight of how momentous that is, but when you stop to consider what it means and the possible reasons behind it, it's profoundly sobering.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 40-41

Quote of the Day

It is your obligation, beloved, to school yourselves, and other white folk, too, about the seductive, mythical, neutrality of whiteness, the belief that you are somehow American without a racial identity, without racial baggage.  "While it is dangerous to say that all whites have equal access to wealth and education," one of my white students writes, "the fact of the matter is that white people will not be followed in a store, frisked on a New York sidewalk, or shot by police at the same rate as black people.  Whites must understand that they benefit from white privilege in order to realize how white privilege creates the space for black oppression."

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 204

Quote of the Day

If Trump had won by 3 million votes, lost electoral college by 80K and Russia had hacked RNC, Republicans would have SHUT DOWN AMERICA.

-- Peter Daou

Quote of the Day

Beloved, you must not only read about black life, but you must school your white brothers and sisters, your cousins and uncles, your loved ones and friends, and all who will listen to you, about the white elephant in the room -- white privilege.  Share with them what you learn about us, but share as well what you learn about yourself, about how whiteness works.  You see, my friends, there is only so much I can say to white folk, only so much they can hear from me or anyone who isn't white.  They may not be as defensive with you, so you must be an ambassador of truth to your own tribes...

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 203

Quote of the Day

The women's movement got us into the workplace, but it didn't make us safe once we got there.  The battle lines are now clear.  We need to move this revolution forward and make our workplaces safe.  Corporate America is quite clearly failing to do so, and unless it does something to change that, we need to keep doing more ourselves.

-- Ann Curry

Quote of the Day

I never stopped getting asked, "Why do you want to be President?  Why?  But, really -- why?"  The implication was that there must be something else going on, some dark ambition and craving for power.  Nobody psychoanalyzed Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or Bernie Sanders about why they ran.  It was just accepted as normal.  But for me, it was regarded as inevitable -- people assumed I'd run no matter what -- yet somehow abnormal, demanding a profound explanation.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 40

Quote of the Day

We do not hate you, white America.  We hate that you terrorize us and then lie about it and then make us feel crazy for having to explain to you how crazy it makes us feel.  We cannot hate you, not really, not most of us; that is our gift to you.  We cannot halt you; that is our curse.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 193

Quote of the Day

Just keep going.

No feeling is final.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Quote of the Day

You'd be beside yourself if your children were slaughtered, and then had their slaughter justified on television, and on social media, as their names were heedlessly dragged through the mud because they playfully posed as a gangsta and posted the photo to their Facebook or Twitter account.  How many of your kids do that too?  Yet they grow up to be bankers and lawyers or cops who kill black people because those black people provoke suspicion by doing the very thing those same cops did when they were young.  But they didn't end up dead.  They end up making us dead.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 192

Quote of the Day

How could sixty-two million people vote for someone they heard on tape bragging about repeated sexual assault?  How could he attack women, immigrants, Muslims, Mexican Americans, prisoners of war, and people with disabilities -- and, as a businessman, be accused of scamming countless small businesses, contractors, students, and seniors -- and still be elected to the most important and powerful job in the world?

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 15

Quote of the Day

Beloved, you must not be defensive when you hear our hurt.  We who proclaim the terror of cops do not hate all cops.  We hate what cops have been made to be.  We hate how cops hate us.  We hate that cops don't treat us the way they treat you.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 191

Quote of the Day

The Women's March was the biggest single protest in American history.  Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.  Thousands also turned out in places like Wyoming and Alaska.  In Washington, the march dwarfed the crowd that had gathered to see Trump's inauguration the day before.  And it was completely peaceful.  Maybe that's what happens when you put women in charge.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 13

Quote of the Day

Imagine if every time a white person committed a crime, especially a mass shooting, all white people had to apologize.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 187

Quote of the Day

One thing I've learned over the years is how easy it is for some people to say horrible things about me when I'm not around, but how hard it is for them to look me in the eye and say it to my face.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 12

Quote of the Day

To pretend that the solution is to bring back a lost balance between black folk and cops ignores history, ignores racial terror, ignores how things are not, and have never been, equal.  It is to ignore the even more insistent strains of Coptopia, an ideal state of affairs where police can display ghastly inventiveness in traumatizing or disappearing black and brown bodies while demanding even greater public reverence.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 186

Quote of the Day

Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism.  This is what the Soviets did when they erased political dissidents from historical photos.  This is what happens in George Orwell's classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered.  The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves.  For Trump, as with so much he does, it's about simple dominance.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 9

Quote of the Day

That metaphor of a few bad apples doesn't begin to get at the root of the problem.  Police violence may be more like a poisoned water stream that pollutes the entire system.  To argue that only a few bad cops cause police terror is like relegating racism to a few bigots.  Bigots are surely a problem, but they are sustained by systems of belief and perception, by widely held stereotypes and social practice.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 185

Quote of the Day

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.  If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.  If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.

-- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Quote of the Day

Beloved, surely you must see that cops loathe being held accountable for their actions, especially when it comes to us.  The cops and their advocates claim that only a few rogue cops give a bad name to the rest.  But isn't that like claiming that most of one's cells are healthy and that only a few are cancerous?

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 185

Quote of the Day

When the most powerful person in our country says, "Don't believe your eyes, don't believe the experts, don't believe the numbers, just believe me," that rips a big hole in a free democratic society like ours.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 8-9

Quote of the Day

Cops always seem to know that the black person who is eccentric, or mentally deranged, deserves to die.  Yet they also seem to know that the demented white bigot who mows down nine black folk in a southern church deserves to be treated to fast food before being calmly booked.  Cops seem to know that all those white folk who come at cops with swinging fists or menacing demeanors or drawn guns don't really mean them any harm.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 184-185

Quote of the Day

Listening to Trump [during his inaugural address], it almost felt like there was no such thing as truth anymore.  It still feels that way.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. 8

Quote of the Day

Our troubles are worsened when politicians insist that cops and unarmed black folk are equal.  Police have badges and batons and Tasers and bullets and guns.  Police begin with a shield of honor and incorruptibility.  Police start with the support of the state.  We are hardly equal.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 184

Quote of the Day

We can't understand what happened in 2016 without confronting the audacious information warfare waged from the Kremlin, the unprecedented intervention in our election by the director of the FBI, a political press that told voters that my emails were the most important story, and deep currents of anger and resentment flowing through our culture.  I know some people don't want to hear about these things, especially from me.  But we have to get this right.  The lessons we draw from 2016 could help determine whether we can heal our democracy and protect it in the future, and whether we as citizens can begin to bridge our divides.  I want my grandchildren and all future generations to know what really happened.  We have a responsibility to history -- and to a concerned world -- to set the record straight.

-- Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened, p. xii

Quote of the Day

Do you really think that black people bring this terror upon ourselves?  That a woman who's being intimidated by a cop and calls 911 brings it on herself?  How absurd is it to have to call the cops on the cops and then have the cop get mad and not be disciplined or punished?  How absurd is it that not a single cop got held accountable for Freddie Gray's death, as if he somehow snapped his own spine to spite the Baltimore police?

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 183

Quote of the Day

Beloved, the way we feel about cops is how many of you feel in the face of terror.  And yet, long before 9/11, long before Al-Qaeda, long before ISIS, we felt that too, at your hands, at the hands of your ancestors, at the hands of your kin who are our cops.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 182

Quote of the Day

White cops have frequently tried out their racist talk and ugly behavior on black and brown officers before assaulting the broader community.  When politicians talk of restoring trust between black folk and the cops, they are seriously deluded, or they have a gigantic case of amnesia.  Black and brown folk have never trusted the cops.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 181

Quote of the Day

The policeman has never been neutral to us.  From the start he was not there to protect or serve us, but to protect and serve you, which often meant getting rid of us.  The policing of the black body started in slavery when enslaved men and women had handcuffs slapped on their wrists and irons fixed on their legs as they got jammed into the hulls of slave ships.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 179-180

Quote of the Day

We think of the police who kill us for no good reason as ISIS ... Like all terrorists they hate us for who we are.  They hate us because of the bad things they -- and you -- think we do.  Like breathe.  Live.  That is our sin.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 178

Quote of the Day

If you're honest you'll see that the police force is a metaphysical collective with a gift for racial punishment that has never viewed black folk as human beings, because the law that they are charged to enforce has never seen us as human beings.  And the Constitution that the law rests on did not write us in as fully human.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 174

Quote of the Day

Have you not seen how no matter what we do the cops come for us?  That no matter how pleasant our speech, how lowly our spirits, how tame our bodies, how domesticated our gestures, we are read as a menace and threat by so many cops?  "I feared for my life," many cops who have shot unarmed black folk have said.  Not a gun in sight.  No attack in the offing.  And yet we are consistently, without conscience, cut down in the streets.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 173

Quote of the Day

Beloved, some of you seem genuinely surprised that most black folk fear the police.  You are sometimes shocked that we think of them as a brutalizing force.  You cringe when we say they are out to do everything but serve and protect us.  You think we are manufacturing stories about our bad encounters with police.  You think that we must have done something wrong to provoke such remorseless cruelty.  And yet we have exhausted ourselves telling you how they mistreat us so routinely that it is accepted as the way things are and will always be. 

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 170

Quote of the Day

In black life light skin is valued because it is closer to your white skin, and those with it are deemed to be closer to your so-called civilizing influence.  That very notion reeks of barbarism, reeks of a crude, primeval equivalence between epidermis and humanity, reeks, therefore, of white supremacy.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 157-158

Quote of the Day

Beloved, let's try a brief thought experiment.  Let's apply the logic of some of your arguments about black folk to you.  Take your argument that we should pay more attention to black-on-black crime than white cops killing black folk because more blacks are killed by other blacks.  Now let's compare the number of white Americans killed by whites to the number of Americans killed by terrorist acts.  I can already feel your hair standing on end.  You see how hurtful it is to make such a comparison?  You see how it could miss the point of giving each cause of suffering its due?  According to your logic, we should not be concerned with  political acts of terror committed on American soil because, since 9/11, less than 100 people have been killed in such attacks in America while 11,208 people were killed by firearms in 2013 alone and 21,175 died by suicide with a firearm.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 150-151

Quote of the Day

There is no inherent blackness to the crime that occurs in black communities.  Take blackness out of the equation and you'd have social engineers and Ivy League professors trying to fix crime-infested communities.  We know this because big brains and social reformers from the late 1800s well into the 1930s successfully addressed crime waves set in motion, and endured, by poor European immigrants.  Keep blackness in place and you have social engineers and Ivy League professors blasting the intrinsic pathology and inherent depravity of black life.  These experts will conclude that our families and neighborhoods produce the seeds of their own destruction.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 149-150

Quote of the Day

Ninety-three percent of black folk who are killed are killed by other black folk.  But 84 percent of white folk who are killed are killed by other white folk.  It's not necessary to modify the noun murder with the adjective black.  It happens in the white world too.  Where's the white-on-white crime rhetoric?  Where are the rants against white folk ruining white culture with their murderous ways?

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 148

Quote of the Day

Sadly, even today, most US citizens never leave the country and many never, or rarely, leave their home state.  This lack of curiosity about, let alone respect for, other cultures is a hallmark of US nationalism and part of why Americans continue to condone stupid and self-defeating foreign policies.

-- Cleve Jones, When We Rise, p. 76

Quote of the Day

The notion that we are indifferent to murders by other blacks is nonsense.  But we also know that if Jamal or Willie kills somebody, and they're caught, they're going to jail.  Cops are rarely held accountable for their slaughter of black people.  Neither Jamal nor Willie pledged to protect and serve the community.  Neither of them has been issued a badge and a gun to represent the state.  The police have a higher standard to meet, a greater obligation to be cautious in using lethal force.  Black folk do protest, to each other, to a world that largely refuses to listen, the killing of blacks by other blacks.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 147

Quote of the Day

Be brave, like a new seed bursting with extraordinary promise.

-- Kwame Alexander, Out of Wonder, p. 40

Quote of the Day

Do you think we like being killed by folk who look like us?  Do you think it doesn't bother us?  Our bullets are often aimed at each other because we're too near the site of pain and heartbreak, frustration and depression.  We often lack food and shelter, and we live in homes overrun with bodies, leaving us little room or rest.  So we lash out at them, or at an acquaintance, or a partner in crime.  Yes, it is true: sometimes we send them, or, perhaps, a stranger nearby, to their eternal reward.  This is the geography of despair.  It is also the pain of never having control, of always being afraid, of struggling to care for and love what we cannot protect.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 144

Quote of the Day

Poetry is remembering the things that matter.

-- Chris Colderley, Out of Wonder, p. 9

Quote of the Day

I'll be honest and admit that there are ways that black folk are doing ourselves in.  But I hope you can admit that even those ways are often linked to our gutless embrace of the bigotries you spew.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 144

Quote of the Day

Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.

-- Lucille Clifton

Quote of the Day

Beloved, why is it that every time black folk talk about how poorly the cops treat us you say that we should focus instead on how we slaughter each other in the streets every day?  Isn't that like asking the person who tells you that they're suffering from cancer to focus instead on their diabetes?  Your racial bedside manner has always been fairly atrocious.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 143

Quote of the Day

Poems are not static objects.  They are ever-evolving ideas that speak to us in different ways at different times in our lives.

-- Kwame Alexander, Out of Wonder, Preface

Quote of the Day

The white folk who claim that the call to stop using the word [nigger] is to cave in to political correctness ignore history and black humanity.  They are the kind of whites who pose as "honest."

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 136

Quote of the Day

Poems can inspire us -- in our classrooms and in our homes -- to write our own journeys, to find our own voices.

-- Kwame Alexander, Out of Wonder, Preface

Quote of the Day

Black folk have had to know white culture inside out ... We have to know as much as we can know about you to keep you from wrecking our lives because you had a bad day.  We have to know all we can know about you to keep you from firing us or gentrifying our communities and shipping us to the outer perimeters of hell.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 135-136

Quote of the Day

A poem is a small but powerful thing.  It has the power to reach inside of you, to ignite something in you, and to change you in ways you never imagined.  There is a feeling of connection and communion -- with the author and the subject -- when we read a poem that articulates our deepest feelings.  That connection can be a vehicle on the road to creativity and imagination.

-- Kwame Alexander, Out of Wonder, Preface

Quote of the Day

Nigger condenses the history of hate and the culture of violence against black folk.  When white folk say the word they bridge the gap between themselves and the hateful history it reflects.  It links verbal and physical violence.  The term is also a form of moral violence.  It has to do with the intentions of white folk when they hurl that word in our presence.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 132

Quote of the Day

Okay, so you're someone who doesn't fit in.  That doesn't mean you have to be surly about it.  The very best outlaws are the charming ones, anyway.  So, be well mannered.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 178

Quote of the Day

Beloved, your white innocence is a burden to you, a burden to the nation, a burden to our progress.  It is time to let it go, to let it die in place of the black bodies that it wills into nonbeing.  In its place should rise a curiosity, but even more, a genuine desire to know and understand just what it means to be black in America.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 123

Quote of the Day

Each time I walk toward what's scaring me most -- and keep on walking toward it -- I end up walking right through that fear to some other side where I am no longer afraid.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 174

Quote of the Day

The greatest mark of our humanity and character shows when we are concerned about others beyond our circle.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 121

Quote of the Day

Cute and dashing are age-free, race-free, class-free and gender-free identities.  You don't need any particular look to be cute or dashing -- it's cross-cultural.  You don't need to spend money on any particular accessories.  Like most things, they work best if you don't force it.  So, get on out there and be cute or dashing.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 174

Quote of the Day

Patriotism is the belief in the best values of one's country, and the pursuit of the best means to realize those values.  If the nation strays, then it must be corrected.  The patriot is the person who, spotting the need for change, says so clearly and loudly, without hate or rancor.  The nationalist is the person who spurns such correction and would rather take refuge in bigotry than fight it.  It is the nationalists who wrap themselves in a flag and loudly proclaim themselves as patriots.  That is dangerous, as glimpsed in Trump's amplification of racist and xenophobic sentiments.  In the end, Trump is a nationalist, and Kaepernick is a patriot.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 116

Quote of the Day

Cute doesn't mean weak, subservient, or incapable of protecting oneself.  To the contrary, cute is distinctively capable of inflicting serious damage.  Porcupines are super cute, but you wouldn't want to fuck with one.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 173-174

Quote of the Day

Nationalism is the uncritical celebration of one's nation regardless of its moral or political virtue.  It is summarized in the saying, "My country right or wrong."  Lump it or leave it.  Nationalism is a harmful belief that can lead a country down a dangerous spiral of arrogance, or off a precipice of political narcissism.  Nationalism is the belief that no matter what one's country does -- whether racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, or the like -- it must be supported and accepted entirely.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 116

Quote of the Day

One of the best things about being a recognizable freak or outsider is that your best friends don't mind, and usually even appreciate, a lot of the weird stuff about you.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 167

Quote of the Day

The opposition to black displays of dissent rests on a faulty premise and a confusion of terms.  Many of you who oppose our dissent because of patriotism are really opposing us because of nationalism, and, whether you know it or not, a white nationalism at that.  There is a big difference between nationalism and patriotism.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 116

Quote of the Day

Keeping a secret, staying in some closet, never expressing some loving part of ourselves can drain our energy to the point of exhaustion.  And then there's all the paranoia about someone finding out.  It makes you jumpy.  So, come on out.  You don't have to come out to everyone all at once.  Start by coming out to someone that other people have safely come out to.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 166

Quote of the Day

Donald Trump is missing the point when he says that [Colin] Kaepernick should "find a country that works better for him."  Instead, Kaepernick believes so deeply in this country that he is willing to offer correction rather than abandon the nation -- and to donate a million dollars in support of racial justice causes.  But innocent whiteness recoils at such instruction.  It pushes back against the notion that it could possibly learn anything from a black body kneeling on white sacred territory.  But it is that same territory that profanes and then swallows the bodies of unarmed black folk.  We must see Kaepernick's criticism as love -- the tough love that America needs.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 115

Quote of the Day

It's always worth the risk to come out of whatever closet we've been keeping ourselves in.  But each of us is entitled to make the decision about just how and when to do it.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 165

Quote of the Day

What some of you are missing is that [Colin] Kaepernick is the best kind of American there is: one willing to criticize his country precisely because he loves it so much.  James Baldwin said it best when he wrote, "I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."  Both Baldwin and Kaepernick have offended you so greatly because they insisted on separating whiteness from American identity.  The two are neither synonymous nor exhaustive; they neither signify all that America means, nor can they possibly radiate the full brightness of her promise.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 115

Quote of the Day

You don't have to support a despot just because he's holding the office of president of the United States.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 143

Quote of the Day

How many of you realize that black soldiers who had fought valiantly for American liberties sometimes returned home to die on the lynching tree because racist whites resented them for wearing the uniform or hoisting the American flag?

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 113

Quote of the Day

There's a Native American saying that goes something like, "Show me who you love, and I'll know who you are."  If you want to get to the heart of a person you're trying to get to know, find out who or what it is they love.  Let someone know who or what you love, too.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 137

Quote of the Day

How many of you who claim that [Colin] Kaepernick is unpatriotic realize that many black men put on an American uniform and fought overseas, only to return home to be spurned and denied the rights for which they fought?

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 113

Quote of the Day

The odds are skyrocket high that you've got something in common with anyone you meet, if you listen sincerely enough.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 137

Quote of the Day

Yes, yes, some will say -- but not all Republicans are like Trump.  Not all of them even like Trump.  It is true that parts of the Republican establishment finally, and unconvincingly, rebelled against Trump.  But it was these same "reasonable" Republicans who ignored his early impact.  They refused to listen to those who insisted that his vitriol was destructive to the country.  As long as it didn't impact Republican, or white, interests, the lives Trump imperiled didn't matter.  Now that he has been elected president, many Republicans have overcome their misgivings and enthusiastically returned to the fold.  The party for which he is now standard-bearer must be held accountable for his creation.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 110-111

Quote of the Day

Stuff tends to sell when it's made from a completely different perspective than most people are used to.  Art and craft have value because they can make people think and feel things that they aren't used to thinking or feeling.  The truer you are to yourself while you are making your stuff, the more success you'll find in selling it.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 132

Quote of the Day

Trump, more than anything else, signifies the undying force of the fear unleashed by Obama's presidency.  He manipulates a confused and self-pitying white public.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 110

Quote of the Day

You don't have to pay attention to who may or may not look at (your art).  Make art because it's better than being mean and/or hurting anyone, including yourself.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 131

Quote of the Day

Barack Obama so spooked the bigoted whites of this country that we are now faced with a racist explicitness that we haven't seen since the height of the civil rights movement.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 110

Quote of the Day

The good news about suicidal longing is that it's got the potential to fuel great art.  The better news is that whatever has got you thinking about killing yourself will lose its power when you use it to make art instead.  The best news is that you don't have to be an artist for this alternative to work.  Everyone, I repeat, everyone, can make art that speaks to someone.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 131

Quote of the Day

Trump's efficacy as an ambassador of unrepentant white innocence, and ignorance, and privilege, doesn't depend on whether his personal racial views add up to bigotry.  What he's done in public will suffice to pass judgment.  Trump's political popularity took off when he sullied the citizenship of Barack Obama, the nation's first black president.  The "birther" claims were driven by unwarranted skepticism about the place of Obama's birth and the status of his birth certificate.  Trump's recent assertion that Obama is an American still rang false and appeared as little more than an attempt to deflect responsibility for his vicious views onto his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.  His admission that he said Obama was born in America to keep his campaign going was a moment of ruthless honesty that sealed the case.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 109-110

Quote of the Day

Artistic genius is usually not the product of a life easily lived.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 131

Quote of the Day

(Donald Trump) possesses a brutally appealing magnetism that, tragically, amplifies the most virulent rumblings of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia this country has reckoned with in quite some time.  That is because Donald Trump is the literal face of white innocence without consciousness, white privilege without apology.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 109

Quote of the Day

Hollywood -- Hollywood, where shiny tan white people play Egyptian pharaohs and queens -- never told my mom that Cleopatra looked like her.  That Cleopatra had dark skin and a round body.

-- Gabourey Sidibe, This Is Just My Face, p. 28-29

Quote of the Day

Making people laugh is an excellent way to deflect violence and insults, and reclaim our own voices.  It's smoke and mirrors.  It gives you the control to focus audience attention where you want it and explore the parts of your suffering that you find humor in.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 130

Quote of the Day

It is harder to indict forces and institutions than the individuals who put a face to the problem.  Institutional racism is a system of ingrained social practices that perpetuate and preserve racial hierarchy.  Institutional racism requires neither conscious effort nor individual intent.  It is glimpsed in the denial of quality education to black and brown students because they live in poor neighborhoods where public schools depend on the tax base for revenue.  Minority students, like the ones I teach at Georgetown, are more often beset by economic and social forces than overt efforts to deny them equal education.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 107

Quote of the Day

The standards of beauty in America's uber-culture are purposefully set too high so that we will buy anything in our frantic scramble to become attractive.  We are meant to feel crushed, inadequate, and less-than so that we'll buy more and more things in the vain hope of "fixing" ourselves.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 128

Quote of the Day

There is a big difference between the act of owning up to your part in perpetuating white privilege and the notion that you alone, or mostly, are responsible for the unjust system we fight.  You make our request appear ridiculous by exaggerating its moral demand, by making it seem only, or even primarily, individual, when it is symbolic, collective.  By over dramatizing the nature of your personal actions you sidestep complicity.  By sidestepping complicity, you hold fast to innocence.  By holding fast to innocence, you maintain power.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 105

Quote of the Day

Making peace with ourselves over something we've done is how we teach ourselves not to do dishonorable things in the future.  If we need time away in order to make that kind of peace, then we should take that time.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 123-124

Quote of the Day

The most radical action a white person can take is to acknowledge this denied privilege, to say, "Yes, you're right.  In our institutional structures, and in deep psychological structures, our underlying assumption is that our lives are worth more than yours."

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 104

Quote of the Day

Try it out: spend one day living like you're some visiting dignitary in a world that welcomes and celebrates people like you.  That's what living your life is supposed to feel like, no matter what kind of freak or outsider other people might think you are.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 111-112

Quote of the Day

This is why the cry "Black Lives Matter" angers you so greatly, why it is utterly offensive and effortlessly revolutionary.  It takes aim at white innocence and insists on uncovering the lie of its neutrality, its naturalness, its normalcy, its normativity.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 104

Quote of the Day

Everyone deserves to feel cared for, respected, and welcome.  So, shouldn't we learn how to do that for ourselves?

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 111

Quote of the Day

White fragility is a will to innocence that serves to bury the violence it sits on top of.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 103

Quote of the Day

Less and less movement is a sign of less and less life.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 107

Quote of the Day

As my brave white student discovered, whiteness claims so loudly its innocence because it is guilty, or at least a lot of white folk feel that way.  This is why, of course, your resistance to feelings of guilt is absurdly intense.  There is a terror in accepting accountability, because it doesn't end with your recognition that something is rotten in Denver or Detroit.  It suggests something is amiss across our country.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 100

Quote of the Day

Showing up for one another with authenticity and vulnerability -- and sticking together through life's hard times -- is what bonds us the deepest to each other.  When we learn to connect with people in this way, we foster intimate and lasting, ride-or-die relationships.  Ultimately, the moments of sorrow and fear we sit through together will also give us our moments of greatest nourishment, as both givers and receivers.  So yeah: learning to show up can be scary.  But is the temporary fear and discomfort worth it?  More than anything.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 243

Quote of the Day

No one is perfectly kind, compassionate, and generous.  But you can live a kinder, more compassionate, and generous life by following just one simple rule: DON'T BE MEAN.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 96

Quote of the Day

Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 100

Quote of the Day

For a griever, there is rarely any more comfort than companionship on the awful path of sorrow.  Hopefully, that path will also include joy in time.  But there is no guarantee that it will, and there is no timeline for when it does.  There is no human gain in shying away from that reality, as difficult as it may feel.  That is the plight of the griever; that is the plight of the witness.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 225

Quote of the Day

Being mean triggers shame and regret, not to mention bad karma.  Shame and regret are nature's way of telling us to forgive ourselves for whatever we just did, apologize and make amends for it if we can, and try to do better next time.  That's how we learn to be kind as we keep on in life's journey.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 95-96

Quote of the Day

Although I'm a man of books and thought, I'm also a man of faith.  It is my faith that helps me see how whiteness has become a religion.  The idolatry of whiteness and the cloak of innocence that shields it can only be quenched by love, but not merely, or even primarily, a private, personal notion of love, but a public expression of love that holds us all accountable.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 100

Quote of the Day

Too often, efforts at comforting a suffering person are made before that person is asked how they're feeling.  We want to help by fixing, but that often implies the "fixer" is right, and the person being fixed is "defective" for not having "solved" the problem on their own.  When such attempts to comfort don't work, it's not a problem of the sufferer being unappreciative -- it's simply that the consoler failed to connect.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 224

Quote of the Day

I think anger is a whole lot more positive a feeling than depression.  I feel a lot healthier when I'm angry than when I'm paralyzed in a deep funk.  Other people around me might prefer me when I'm not flying off the handle, but most folks who know me now appreciate that my anger is a step up my own personal ladder to feeling better.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 94-95

Quote of the Day

When many white folk disagree, or feel uncomfortable, they get up and walk out of the room.  Black folk and other people of color rarely exercise that option.  We don't usually believe that doing so would solve anything.  We don't trust that once we leave the room the right thing will be done.  Plus we've fought so hard to get into most rooms that a little discomfort is hardly a reason to drive us from the premises.  Such rooms likely affect our destinies, something that many white folk needn't worry about, because they have access to so many other rooms just like the ones they are leaving.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 98-99

Quote of the Day

A great rule of thumb when supporting someone in a hard time echoes the Hippocratic oath in medicine: "Do no harm."  Resist the problem-solving urge; resist the urge to be smart and "fix" it.  Take comfort in the fact that life gives us plenty of other opportunities to prove how smart we are.  What to do instead?  Embrace the awkward silence.  You'll live through it just fine.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 220

Quote of the Day

The next time you just wanna die, kill off the part of you that got you into trouble instead and go on living as a whole new person.  This is called the art of selective serial suicide.  It's how I try to consciously pick out all the stuff I don't like about myself and mark it for execution.  It's the me who's mean, inconsiderate, greedy, and selfish.  Those are the parts of me I wanna kill off, and I've been doing that consciously for nearly two decades.  I've been killing off the parts of myself that need to die and making lots of room for all the parts of me that are beautiful and kind and life affirming.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 75-76

Quote of the Day

White fragility, as conceived by antiracist activist and educational theorist Robin DiAngelo, at times leads white folk to argue, to retreat into silence, or simply to exit a stressful situation.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 98

Quote of the Day

Another possible, undesirable side effect of a comment like "You are so strong" is that it puts the suffering person on a pedestal and can make them feel reluctant to be "real" with their emotions, for fear of letting others down or burdening them by sharing the real pain they may be going through.  As Kelsey was told by a woman after she lost her spouse: "I cringed when people said, 'You are so strong.'  I may have appeared strong, but I was falling apart inside.  I was surviving only because of Paxil."

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 213

Quote of the Day

If you have a people-pleasing personality, you can get stuck on the treadmill of your life and not look at how you're doing.

-- Judd Apatow

Quote of the Day

However, it is the case that any unfulfilled desire may bring a great deal of pain, sometimes enough pain to make you want to die.  That kind of pain always passes.  Always.  It's not bottomless.  It has an end.  Everyone goes through a time in their life when all there is to living is staying alive one day at a time.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 66

Quote of the Day

White fragility is the belief that even the slightest pressure is seen by white folk as battering, as intolerable, and can provoke anger, fear, and, yes, even guilt.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 98

Quote of the Day

It's hard to resist sharing the twenty-twenty hindsight that comes to us so clearly in the time of someone else's difficulty (but so rarely in times of our own).  But it's never ever the right thing to do.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 211

Quote of the Day

All my philosophies go back to Mr. Rogers. I feel like that simple ideology is not forefront enough in our culture -- kindness, compassion, wanting the other person to be happy.  We live in a world where Republicans want to create laws to make it harder to vote because they know that if more people vote, the party will have a tougher time.  Everyone is suddenly allowed to be a hypocrite because it's just about winning, and I think that will be the death of us.

-- Judd Apatow

Quote of the Day

Desire gets us into trouble when we believe that having or not having something will make us a better or worse person.  That's just not true.  You are a perfectly fine and whole person just the way you are.  Being a better person depends on your intentions to ease suffering for yourself and others.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 64-65

Quote of the Day

You often deem black dissent as disloyalty to America.  But that black dissent may yet redeem a white innocence that threatens the nation's moral and patriotic health.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 96

Quote of the Day

If you ask the person in crisis how they're feeling, and they respond with unbridled optimism or a phrase that you would consider to be a platitude, it's okay to follow their lead and mirror their language.  Your positive perspective, in this case, would likely be helpful.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 211

Quote of the Day

As outsiders in junior high, we never dreamed of questioning people who asked us are we one thing or another, are we with them or against them.  But all that's changed now.  You get to dream and live yourself a good life starting today.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 60

Quote of the Day

You say we black folk are thin-skinned about race ... You argue that all of us are too politically correct ... And yet you barely tolerate any challenge to your thinking on race.  I say thinking, my friends, though that is being kind.  Many of you hardly think of race.  You shield yourselves from what you don't want to understand.  You reveal your brute strength in one contemptible display of power after the next, and yet you claim that we reap benefits by playing the victim.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 95

Quote of the Day

... by using the word empowered to describe women, men are simply maintaining their own power and control.

-- Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band, p. 132

Quote of the Day

If fix-it platitudes are so unhelpful, why are they so common?  Val Walker, in her book, The Art of Comforting, argues that our culture values production over presence, and organization over emotional mess.  We believe in getting things done rather than just letting things be, and we believe that "healing" means getting over rather than learning to live with the loss.  Our discomfort with suffering, and our rush to make it stop, can result in simpleminded fixes that suggest the problem of grief is an easy one to get over.  This superficial effort just makes the suffering person feel even more broken (and pathetic) for suffering at all, and more detached from the person trying to help.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 207

Quote of the Day

Here's a good challenge for you: free your imagination from the institutions that enthrall you.  And when you've finished doing that, go help some other people free theirs.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 60

Quote of the Day

The reason "Black Lives Matter" needs to be shouted is because American history ignored black history, didn't tell black stories.  The founding documents of American society didn't include black life.  When black folk say "Black Lives Matter," they are in search of simple recognition.  That they are decent human beings, that they aren't likely to commit crimes, that they're reasonably smart.  That they're no more evil than the next person, that they're willing to work hard to get ahead, that they love their kids and want them to do better than they did.  That they are loving and kind and compassionate.  And that they should be treated with the same respect that the average, nondescript, unexceptional white male routinely receives without fanfare or the expectation of gratitude in return.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 92-93

Quote of the Day

When you listen to old R&B records, the women on them sang in a really fierce, kick-ass way.  In general, though, women aren't really allowed to be kick-ass.  It's like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing.  Craft, and control, and polish, is for women.  Culturally we don't allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening.  We either shun those women or deem them crazy.  Female singers who push too much, and too hard, don't tend to last very long.  They're jags, bolts, comets: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday.  But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself.  At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it.

-- Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band, p. 127

Quote of the Day

Eventually, with time and perspective, the person in crisis may be able to look back on this time in their lives and think, You know what, I can see how X good thing came out of that terrible event.  Making meaning out of horrible situations does help people cope with them.  But that kind of benefit is something we each arrive at (or not) on our own, in our own time.  No amount of force-fed positivity will help, unless the suffering person is ready to go there.  And in the immediate aftermath of a diagnosis, death, or loss, very few people are.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 205

Quote of the Day

We can begin by celebrating difference.  Let's stop hiding difference away where we don't have to look at it or think about it.  Let's stop teasing, attacking, or bombing the hell out of difference just because it's not like us.  Let's stop "tolerating" or "accepting" difference, as if we're so much better for not being different.  Instead, let's celebrate difference, because in this world it takes a lot of guts to be different and to act differently.  Exactly how we celebrate difference is for each of us to discover.  But any political movement we support must be one that truly celebrates difference.  That's how we start to put an end to the bully culture that's spreading across this country and the world at such an alarming rate.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 59

Quote of the Day

Many of you are "shocked, shocked!" that black folk have taken to reminding you that "Black Lives Matter."  Some of you are just peeved, but others of you are enraged.  That's because you're used to distorting and diluting our history without much frontal challenge.  You fail to realize that the nation has already set the standard for determining which lives matter and which don't.  Black lives were excluded from the start.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 92

Quote of the Day

... first records succeed now and again because you don't quite know what you're doing but you go ahead and do it anyway.

-- Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band, p. 123

Quote of the Day

You may very well believe that everything happens for a reason, or that God has a plan.  Many people do.  But these are your beliefs, and unless you know that the suffering person shares them, they likely won't serve as comfort the way they might for you.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 205

Quote of the Day

Look, I want to be a good and better person every day of my life.  I want to be the best possible me I can be.  I want to live in a world where people won't try to hurt me for trying to achieve happiness the best way I've found to do so.  I assume that other people want that, too.  You want to be a good and better person.  I believe that.  So, let's put aside the mean ways of doing things that we developed because, for some reason or other, we couldn't see that there were other options.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 58-59

Quote of the Day

My friends, we cannot deny that white folk of conscience were of enormous help to the cause of black struggle.  Black and white folk often formed dynamic partnerships to combat racial inequality.  But too often white folk want to be treated with kid gloves, or treated like adolescents who can't take the truth of grownup racial history.  So we have to spoon-feed you that truth and put your white faces in our stories to make you see them, perhaps like them, or at least to consider them legitimate and worthy of your attention.  Appealing to your ego to protect our backsides, that's the bargain many of us are forced to make.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 91-92

Quote of the Day

Families are like little villages.  You know where everything is, you know how everything works, your identity is fixed, and you can't really leave, or connect with anything or anybody outside, until you're physically no longer there.

-- Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band, p. 59

Quote of the Day

Research backs this up: unbridled positivity in an experience of failure or distress makes people feel worse, not better.  What ours and the experience of many others also confirms is that putting a positive spin on something difficult usually winds up feeling like an effort to get the griever to stop talking about it, making the griever shut down (and stop calling you).

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 205

Quote of the Day

Changing our cruel, childish dynamics is not anything that can be legislated.  A new, inclusive, and compassionate politic must be lived by more and more people every day, free from the institutions that would enthrall them.  It's got to start with each and every one of us.  We need to include in our loving, caring, generous, and compassionate lives people who share our loving, caring, generous, and compassionate values, no matter their race or politics or religion, no matter their gender or sexuality.  We need to work on behalf of everyone who's being oppressed by a system we bought into as children and never bothered to change.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 58

Quote of the Day

One of the greatest privileges of whiteness is not to see color, not to see race, and not to pay a price for ignoring it, except, of course, when you're called on it.  But even then, that price pales, quite literally, in comparison to the high price black folk pay for being black.  We pay a price, too, for not even being able to derive recognition, and financial reward, for the styles that make the world want to be black so bad that they don't mind looking like us, as long as they never, ever have to be us. 

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 86

Quote of the Day

... to overcome my own hypersensitivity, I had no choice but to turn fearless.

-- Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band, p. 14

Quote of the Day

It can be hard for the optimistically inclined among us to hear, but optimistic reactions, ones that people who are grieving might consider irrationally optimistic, can be even tougher to bear than pessimistic reactions.  For people in crisis, ill-timed optimism just feels like a meaningless empty platitude, especially for a situation that really might not get better.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 204-205

Quote of the Day

I am saying that everyone would benefit from a change in the dynamic that oppresses us all in one way or another.  I am asking you to do something, anything, every day to change the way we as a culture have been dealing with difference.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 57-58

Quote of the Day

When some of you say, "I don't see color," you are either well-intending naifs or willful race evaders.  In either case you don't help the cause.  The failure to see color only benefits white America.  A world without color is a world without racial debt.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 86

Quote of the Day

When you want to reach out to a person going through something that you've also experienced yourself, you can now see why it's a good idea to restrain your normal, but incredibly unhelpful impulse to compare your situations.  If you don't feel prepared to handle someone else's difficulty because of the intense feelings it brings up about your own...explore other ways of being there for your friend that don't involve much talking about it.  And if you want to talk about the feelings that are coming up for you as a result of a friend's difficult time, talk to others about what's going on -- not your suffering friend.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 198

Quote of the Day

I think, instead, we should try something like this: "Excuse me...I hope I'm not interrupting," and only when we've determined that we're truly not interrupting someone or intruding on their privacy, do we proceed to ask, "I find you fascinating and so different from me.  Might I ask you what your life's been like?  I think we could learn something from each other."  How about that for putting aside childish ways that no longer work in the lives of kind, generous, inclusive adults?  Isn't that easy?

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 56-57

Quote of the Day

The appropriation of "minority" cultures by white writers with a political advantage leaves people of color little room to speak their truths in their own ways.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 84

Quote of the Day

Unless you actually are an expert, whose expertise is being asked for, hearing news of someone's crisis is not the time to offer up casual theories about their misfortune.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 197

Quote of the Day

I think it's time for all of us to put away the childish things that don't work in the lives of kind, generous adults.  I think we need to find alternatives to saying, or even thinking, childish things like, "Hey Faggot, Hey Cunt, Hey Nigger..."  I think we need to find alternatives to saying, or even just thinking, childish things like, "You're too fat to be on our side," or too ugly, or too poor, or too Arab...I think we need to find alternatives to saying, or even just thinking, childish things like, "You're either with us, or you're against us..."

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 56

Quote of the Day

When it comes to race the past is always present.  What Jim Crow achieved in the past through, say, redlining -- where services like banking, insurance, health care, and supermarkets are denied to specific racial or ethnic groups -- continues to this day.  Formal segregation in housing policies may have been struck down, but steering, where real estate brokers direct home buyers toward or away from particular neighborhoods based on race, is as effective as ever.  School segregation is no longer the law of the land, but classrooms today are depressingly re-segregated.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 79-80

Quote of the Day

When it comes to being supportive, being smart matters way less than being kind (and well mannered).

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 197

Quote of the Day

As kids, most of us didn't kill the class freaks.  But, we developed something equally effective: We knew how to make the class freaks want to kill themselves.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 52

Quote of the Day

A great deal of white advantage has nothing to do with how you actively resist black success, or the success of other people of color.  It's what you do for each other, how you take each other into account, that makes up a lot of what we have come to call "white privilege."

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 79

Quote of the Day

When we're trying to relate to someone in their difficult time, our most common instinct is to compare it to our own situation ... when doing so, it may seem altruistic to help someone not feel alone.  But in fact, comments such as "I know how you feel" or "That's so much like what happened to me" can close off opportunities to learn what the person in crisis is feeling.  As one divorced person said: "My mother believed that my divorce would be just like hers.  She didn't want to, or couldn't, see that my divorce was different, that I am different!"  As someone who lost both parents said: "In general, I'm surprised by how folks are quick to start telling their own story but not really care about yours."

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 190-191

Quote of the Day

By leaving no options for an outsider in the world, a bully culture engineers its own destruction.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 51

Quote of the Day

One of the great perks of being white in America is the capacity to forget at will.  The sort of amnesia that blankets white America is reflected in an Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman lyric sung by Barbra Streisand: "What's too painful to remember we simply choose to forget."  The second stage of grief flashes in the assertion "it didn't happen."  Instead of "forget it," there is "deny it."  Civil rights icon Joseph Lowery often says that we live in the fifty-first state, the state of denial.  Denial is even more sinister than amnesia because there is some concession to facts that are then roundly negated.  Here is where the gaslight effect goes wild.  Black folk are made to feel crazy for believing something they know to be true.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 78

Quote of the Day

Loss doesn't have an expiration date.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 134

Quote of the Day

On this continent alone, some of us grew up Christian, some of us Jewish, and some Unitarian.  Some of us were raised Buddhist, some Quaker, or Muslim, Hindu, or Wiccan.  Some of us were even raised Scientologist.  Many of us have been taught that our own mythology is the right, or only, one.  This makes coexistence way tougher than it needs to be.  Mythologies with more power than others to enforce their beliefs bully the world and make it difficult, or nearly impossible, to live differently from their traditions and from their ideas of purity and righteousness.  Ideally, nobody would wanna impose their beliefs on anyone -- we would just try to prevent meanness and preserve everyone's right to pursue happiness.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 49

Quote of the Day

President Donald Trump chose "Make America Great Again" as his 2016 campaign slogan.  It sounded the call to white America to return to simpler, better days.  But the golden age of the past is a fiction, a projection of nostalgia that selects what is most comforting to remember.  It summons a past that was not great for all; in fact, it is a past that was not great at all, not with racism and sexism clouding the culture.  Going back to a time that was great depends on deliberate disremembering.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 77-78

Quote of the Day

Remember how burdensome and unlovable a person in need can feel?  There's nothing like being in a shitty or scary time and hearing from others that they love you.  In person, via text or email, written on a cake, however and how often you can do it, say I love, admire, respect you, or express whatever kind of adoration you actually have for a person.  It can't go wrong.  And it's sorely needed, and deeply appreciated.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 130

Quote of the Day

Some of us have never felt included or welcome in whatever system of belief was bullying us, even the one that we were a part of.  Some of us were forced to seek out mythologies that sang to us from the popular culture in the voices of movie stars or television characters.  We have looked for myths that include us in great novels, music, the latest comic book, or even some stupid advertising campaign.  We'll look anywhere for a mythology that embraces people like ourselves.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 48

Quote of the Day

Slavery made America a slave to black history.  As much as white America invented us, the nation can never be free of us now.  America doesn't even exist without us.  That's why Barack Obama was so offensive, so scary to white America.  America shudders and says to itself: The president's supposed to be us, not them.  In that light, Donald Trump's victory was hardly surprising.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 76

Quote of the Day

Knowing what to say, and when to say it, starts with these two very simple principles of supportive communication:

1. You can't solve the problem.
2. You'll never know how they feel.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 102

Quote of the Day

Two hundred years after the founding of this country, why are those of us who don't fit into some either/or told that our pursuit of happiness doesn't count?  Are we going to continue nit-picking over exactly which happiness is legal and important, and which happiness is illegal and unimportant?  Who has the right to say whose happiness is right?  It all comes down to the mythology we grew up with.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 48

Quote of the Day

Beloved, white racial grief erupts when you fear losing your dominance.  You get mighty angry at our demand that you live up to the sense of responsibility you say others should have -- especially black folk and people of color.  You often tell us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, to make no excuses for our failures, and to instead admit our flaws and better ourselves.  And yet so many of you, beloved, are obstinate to a fault, intransigent and thin-skinned when it comes to accepting the calling out you effortlessly offer to others.  Donald Trump is only the most recent and boisterous example.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 73-74

Quote of the Day

When the silence of listening is uncomfortable, it's not because silence is a problem.  It's because you aren't used to it.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 94

Quote of the Day

All the world's great civil rights movements have sought to harmlessly break some cultural bully standard.  And all the outlaws who survived those civil rights movements have learned an important lesson.  We understand that we can be outsiders and be miserable about it, or we can be outsiders and enjoy the fuck out of ourselves until we're old and weird and happy just being our geeky, freaky, outlaw selves.  Understanding that is how we stay alive in a world that doesn't like who or what we are, what we look like, who we love, or how we act.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 45

Quote of the Day

Working as a white ally is tough, but certainly not impossible.  Learning to listen is a virtue that whiteness has often avoided.  I asked (a would-be white ally) to engage, to adopt the vocabulary of empathy, to develop fluidity in the dialect of hope and the language of racial understanding.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 70

Quote of the Day

If we are to fully give, we must do so by first giving compassion to ourselves.  Because what someone in crisis really needs is not your skilled perfection, but you.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 85

Quote of the Day

Our imaginations are in thrall to the institutions of oppression.

-- Minnie Bruce Pratt

Quote of the Day

To be black in America means always taking in views we disagree with, not out of altruism, but out of necessity and the impulse to survive.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 69

Quote of the Day

Compassion for others isn't fully possible if we don't also have compassion for ourselves.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 84

Quote of the Day

Bullies can make life miserable.  And I'm not just talking about kids, because bullies don't stop being bullies once they've grown up, they just get more sophisticated ... most systems we've developed as a culture to classify ourselves -- systems like sexuality, gender, race, class, and age -- are not typically questioned all that much.  Those in political power these days actively discourage questions that challenge their bully culture.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 33

Quote of the Day

There is a paradox that many of you refuse to see: to get to a point where race won't make a difference, we have to wrestle, first, with the difference that race makes.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 67

Quote of the Day

When you recognize that bad things happen to good people, and also, that bad things actually happen to you -- it creates a connection around suffering that is a two-way relationship between equals.  Compassion is not a relationship built on a notion of one always-messed-up person matched with one always-saving-the-world person.  It is built upon each of us being messed up in many points of our lives.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 65

Quote of the Day

This book is a lot about learning how to give yourself permission to go on living even when it really hurts.  Right now you might be glad I've given you permission.  Eventually, you'll no longer need anyone's but your own.  Permission to do what?  Permission to take yet another stab at putting together the kind of identity that makes you feel that you're being true to yourself and that life is worth living.  Go ahead, give yourself permission to become the kind of person you've always dreamed you could be.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 32

Quote of the Day

O. J. [Simpson] awakened your collective white rage.  That or you're obsessed with him because he's the one that got away, the one who challenged your view of whiteness, made you madder than anybody -- that is, until Obama.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 63

Quote of the Day

Acknowledging someone's pain by feeling FOR them, but not actually feeling WITH them, is the opposite of supportive compassion.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 64

Quote of the Day

I can tell you this with certainty: You are worthy and capable of finding a way to live your life just the way you really are.  And there are plenty of good people in the world who believe that a life like yours needs to be lived.  If you work at being as fully you as you can possibly be, you will feel better.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 32

Quote of the Day

And even though the egregious errors of the criminal justice system existed long before [O. J.] Simpson, the constant refusal ever since to even charge most white police in the killing of unarmed black motorists is a kind of collective payback for O. J.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 63

Quote of the Day

At its core, compassion is the acceptance of suffering.  That does not mean full detachment, in which you don't give a damn, like "hey, stuff happens, move on."  And it's not an intellectual acceptance of suffering that has you looking at someone's personal tragedy through a cold haze of statistics.  "Well, you know, only one out of five wind up..."  Rather, compassion is the acceptance that awful stuff can happen to any of us.  In fact, that bad things happen to good people all the time.  At the same time, compassion does not mean having a freakout or wincing at somebody's suffering, which feels more like pity than compassion.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 64

Quote of the Day

Standards of cultural identities change depending on generation, degree of multiculturalism, and who's sitting in the White House.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 25

Quote of the Day

The hurts and traumas against black folk had piled so high, the pain had resonated so deeply, and the refusal of whiteness to open its eyes had become so abhorrent that black folk sent a message to white America.  No amount of evidence against [O. J.] Simpson could possibly match the far greater evidence of racial injustice against black folk.  And you can't claim ignorance here, my friends.  If a videotape recording of a black man going down under the withering attack of four white police couldn't convince you of the evil of your system, then nothing could.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 62

Quote of the Day

The way we see it: 1. We don't have the capacity to reach out to every single person in need.  2. But, in reality, we can usually reach out more than we think, and it gets easier with practice.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 62

Quote of the Day

I think the world needs more kind people in it, no matter who or what they are, or do.  The world is healthier because of its outsiders and outlaws and freaks and queers and sinners.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 17

Quote of the Day

I know a lot of you hated (O. J. Simpson's lawyer Johnnie Cochran) because he beat you at your own game.  He sold his vision of history as the one that made the most sense to the group of people, his group of people, on that jury, whose decision, for once, mattered most.  That's usually how whiteness operates in a nutshell.  But this time, for a glancing moment, whiteness got coopted by a devilishly handsome chocolate barrister whose smooth words and hypnotic cadence left the jury and nation spellbound.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 59-60

Quote of the Day

A definition of compassion that we like comes from researchers at the University of Michigan's Compassion Lab: Compassion is to notice, feel, and respond.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 60