Quote of the Day

Many of you were stuck, in 1995, and, sadly, even now, in a whiteness that didn't have to know, that wasn't punished for not knowing.  It is hard for you to give up this willful ignorance.  It is a drug.  It is privilege and addition.  Your whiteness is a shield that keeps you from knowing what black folk must always know.  Not until the [O. J.] Simpson verdict did many of you claim that you were finally awakened to what black folk had to know every day.  But if so, you went back to sleep pretty damn quickly.

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

Quote of the Day

All our difficult times involve some degree of shame, fear, and loneliness.  At times like that, we don't need anyone to impress us or skillfully talk us out of our pain.  We mostly just need the kindness that compels anyone to try.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 59

Quote of the Day

It's hard to be white and empathetic to others.  That sounds harsh, but that's a lesson that whiteness has taught its victims.

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

Quote of the Day

At its core, kindness is a total absence of ego and self-interest in doing something for someone else.  The defining feature of kindness is that it comes unsolicited, and in its most awe-inspiring moments, it comes to the aid of those who are shunned.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 58

Quote of the Day

Whiteness grows more shameless, more cruel, more uncaring by the day.  How many of you have really tried to put yourself in our position?

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

Quote of the Day

More people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason.  That, my friends, that is true perversion.

-- Harvey Milk

More people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, my friends, that is true perversion.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/harvey_milk.html

Quote of the Day

The value of simple kindness can be hard to accept when you're trying to learn the Perfect Way to comfort someone, especially when you're anxious about what not to do or say.  This is why Dr. Charles Garfield, founder of the Shanti Project, which trains volunteers to care for the sick, opens up his training with the following: "Everyone wants skills.  How to say this?  How to do that?  But when people are dying, no amount of skills will earn you trust like the kindness that brings you to them in the first place.  If you take nothing else from this training, take this: Your kindness is your credential."

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 58

Quote of the Day

What starts as shame may end as transformation.

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

Quote of the Day

Maybe because our lives can get more and more mundane the older we get, we find that what sustains us over the long haul -- past all the breakups and professional screwups and weight gain and hair loss -- is not the glittery connections we make when feeling on top of the world, but those we forge when we're at our lowest.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 57

Quote of the Day

Maybe enough time has passed for us to admit that the [O. J.] Simpson verdict made liars of white and black folk alike.  But the lie began long before the Simpson trial.  It has roots in whiteness itself, in whiteness that is a construct, an invention, that keeps white folk ignorant of black life.  It makes so many of you, if we're honest, largely indifferent to black life.  Admit it: you go on your merry white way as if the police aren't routinely hammering black folk without cause, aren't daily brutalizing us in front of your faces, aren't murdering black folk without so much as blinking an eye.  You didn't care then.  And tell the truth -- many of you don't really care now.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 58-59

Quote of the Day

If you're worried that you've screwed up in trying to offer support [to someone who is grieving or suffering], said the wrong thing, or felt like the biggest idiot -- remember that you're not feeling half as terrible as the person at the center of it.  Reaching out and fumbling is often far better than not reaching out at all.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 52

Quote of the Day

In the end, history is never just what the people who experience it say it is.  That's particularly true if those people are not in power, or if their voices, or their view of things, run counter to what the larger culture thinks is true -- in short, what the larger culture thinks is valuable, justifiable, even righteous.  The winners, alas, still write history.  To say this out loud, in this day and age, when whiteness has congratulated itself for its tolerance of other cultures and peoples, is to invite real resistance from white America.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 53

Quote of the Day

If a person is sobbing over a pile of dishes and a pile of bills -- and what feels like a pile of rubble that was formerly their life -- it can feel painful and even pointless to ask for help.  This means that as a caring bystander, you have the opportunity -- and the responsibility -- to show up and offer help without being asked.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 52

Quote of the Day

I'm not asking you to let go of your humanity, but, in the best way possible, to find your way back to it.  You can let go of whiteness when you see it as a moral choice, an ideology, a politic, a terribly fearful reaction to the thing it hates the most but can least afford to do without: the black people it helped to will into existence.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 49

Quote of the Day

The thing about grief is that it can seem like it will never, ever end.  And in a number of ways, it doesn't.  As anyone in the grief world knows, you don't get over loss.  You learn to live with it.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 48

Quote of the Day

The only way to save our nation, and, yes, to save yourselves, is to let go of whiteness and the vision of American history it supports.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 49

Quote of the Day

It's not so much that we forgive to forget, but that we forgive in order to learn about others, learn about ourselves, and let go of resentments that hold us down.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 39

Quote of the Day

Whiteness is an advantage and privilege because you have made it so, not because the universe demands it.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 44

Quote of the Day

Forgiveness doesn't mean burying our feelings and crossing our fingers that they'll just go away.  In order to successfully forgive, we need to take a look at the source of our anger or hurt, with the help of listening friends and occasionally, a professional.  Often, such feelings are rooted in our own sense of unworthiness.  Forgiveness comes when we're able to recognize that the other person's actions were more about them -- their own motivations and context -- than about us.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 39

Quote of the Day

Just two weeks before his death, (Martin Luther King, Jr.) announced, with a broken heart, "Yes, it is true...America is a racist country."  That is why King is important to this generation, to this time, to this nation, to our people.  He spoke the truth that we have yet to fully acknowledge.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 40

Quote of the Day

When we feel others have failed us with their "deficient" efforts, we'll often judge our own efforts to comfort by the same (impossible) standards.  Such high standards of ourselves can make us feel inadequate, prompting us to shy away and do nothing for fear our effort will fall short.  Or, they can cause us to give too much or with excessive worry, which are tendencies that make our gifts harder to receive.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 37

Quote of the Day

Either you give the Negro his God-given rights and his freedom or you face the fact of continual social disruption and chaos.  America, which will you choose?

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Quote of the Day

There are people who let us down, over and over again, and learning to expect less of them is a great practice in self-care.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 37

Quote of the Day

Lord, Dear Lord, I don't want to feel this way, but I swear to you I want to kill dead any Godforsaken soul who thinks that killing black people is an acceptable price to pay for keeping this nation safe.  But then, am I any better than that soul?

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 32

Quote of the Day

If we view people's efforts of kindness as "not enough," then we will likely continue to be disappointed.  That's because if people are afraid of failing us, they will more likely shy away.  Not because they are bad people or evil people.  Like all of us, they're just scared humans who hate the feeling of failure.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 36

Quote of the Day

So many whites say they hate the quotas they associate with affirmative action, but quotas don't seem to bother the white folk in blue who can't get enough of them as they harass one black citizen after another.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 31

Quote of the Day

Being kind to others begins with being kind to ourselves.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 31