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