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