When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as importantly, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don't believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
-- Maria Popova
There will not be a magic day when we wake up and it's now okay to express ourselves publicly. We make that day by doing things publicly until it's simply the way things are.
-- Tammy Baldwin, Millennium March for Equality, 2000
I know what I want, I have a goal, an opinion, I have a religion and love. Let me be myself and then I am satisfied. I know that I'm a woman, a woman with inward strength and plenty of courage.
-- Anne Frank
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
-- Anne Frank
Something just won't let me wiggle free of my theological captivity to hope. To be certain, it's not a vain hope, nor one that is fanciful. Mine is rather a darker hope, one located in the guts of trauma and tragedy as I look on the suffering we have endured because of the pandemic of systemic racism and institutional oppression.
-- Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming, p. 222
... as we reckon with the crisis unleashed by George Floyd's death, we must reckon with the white comfort that permitted white folk to ignore other deaths like his for centuries. Perhaps because of him, and Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Elijah McClain, Hadiya Pendleton, (Sandra Bland), and too many others to name, we will finally come to grips with white comfort and finally proclaim three words that are the very heartbeat of our country and culture, slowly, deliberately, and with appropriate emphasis: Black. Lives. Matter.
-- Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming, p. 215
It falls to genuine white allies to take to task as best they can the unprincipled white nationalists who morally manipulate the white masses.
-- Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming, p. 210
Today, perhaps one of the most useful ways white allies can challenge white comfort is to admit that the embrace of Donald Trump and his troubling ideas is duplicitous: whites want to distance themselves from the racist past while endorsing Trump's racist beliefs in the present day.
-- Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming, p. 209
We should all scrutinize our own worldviews and purge them as much as possible of the poisonous prejudices that plague our existence.
-- Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming, p. 207
Becoming a true ally of the Black fight for social justice means that white folk abide by a credo that complements the one that has served Black folk well: know your white folk. In this instance, white folk must know their Black folk. They must know the kinds of Black folk with whom they get along, who push and challenge them, who insist that they do their best, who offer them tough love and straight talk, who get squarely in the face of their white comfort and unmask its pretensions to solidarity even as it holds to unspoken privileges, unacknowledged biases, and unearned reassurances.
-- Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming, p. 206-207
Some Black folk are resentful of white authors, activists, and experts on race who, riding the wave of white wokeness, end up re-centering whiteness -- because white grief, shame, or guilt over past sins leads them to decry their unfortunate, even tragic exercise of privilege. Thus, racial absolution highlights the bruised or repentant white person, and before you know it the conversation ceases to be about social change and racial justice, and the offending whiteness is once again at the center, while Blackness, as usual, is playing in the background. There is real hurt involved: while Black folk are the true inspiration for woke white writers, they are denied the cultural legitimacy and financial windfall such folk reap once they hit the circuits to tell white folk to stop being white in the ways that Black writers have been saying for centuries.
-- Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming, p. 202-203
There are plenty of Black folk who claim exhaustion. They say they aren't here to serve white folk, not here to educate them, not here to uplift them or to guide them on the path of racial righteousness. They think that is just another way to preserve white comfort and that the most effective way for white folk to overcome their dependence on Blackness is to learn to swim without the aid of Black lifeguards. Beneath that Black exhaustion is a sound reason and wide-awake rationale for such a stance. After all, the argument goes, if white folk really wanted to learn about race, they could have done so long before now. What can we teach them that they haven't already been able to learn? What can we say that hasn't already been said?
-- Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming, p. 201
... in order for white folk to surrender comfort and claim a true awakening, they must hear and not be defensive about Black claims of exhaustion. And, come to think of it, there is (quite literally in the spelling, but of course also in the meanings, beyond etymology, that we bring to the world from the depth of our experience and imagination) rage at the heart of mirage, which is what results when the white illusion that things aren't as bad as we know they are wins out over our descriptions of the hurt and pain we see. There is rage in tragedy, when our enormous anger is sparked by the racial catastrophe and chaos we endure. But there is rage in courage, too, where we are motivated by our rage at the dying of the light to be braver than we might ordinarily be and to forge ahead and make things happen with our energy and determination. And, yes, there is rage in encouragement, too, because when we are disgusted at injustice, we war against it while uplifting the spirits of those who are its greatest victims.
-- Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming, p. 200-201
This sheer Black exhaustion sometimes sounds like cranky disregard for white awakening when in fact it may only be our refusal to any longer consider white comfort. It is also the old recurring fear that this awakening may not last, that even though this time seems different, it may not be. White folk won't really stick with the hard work of genuinely reckoning with the racist past, and therefore we don't want to get too invested -- we don't want to get our hopes up too much. Our cynicism may indeed be a form of hurt, of pain, of racial world-weariness, of emotional depletion, and of soul deflation that comes out as anger or even rage -- a rage that is still hopeful because it believes that rage might make a difference.
-- Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming, p. 199-200
... many Black folk are exhausted: worn out by the cumulative injuries, quiet indignities, loud assaults, existential threats, microaggressions, macro offenses, and unceasing bombarding of our bodies and psyches in the name of white comfort. Many of us would love nothing more than to take a nap and leave white folk to clean up the mess made by centuries of white comfort. That, too, is a form of dreaming while awake, or daydreaming -- the only kind of dreaming we can afford. This is why Langston Hughes strung together magical words of poetry about dreaming and why Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed out loud for the world to hear in Washington, D.C., in 1963. This is why King was forever tired, his weary southern cadence haunted by the somber melodies of sleeplessness. King's lieutenant Andrew Young said he waged "a war on sleep." King warned the nation of the difficulty of "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution," although he was made sleepless by his worry that white folk wouldn't create a just society. King realized that his life was too great a luxury for the guardians of white comfort, mostly because his dream didn't stop in 1963 but rather led him to far more radical visions of economic justice. Like King, most of us must maintain what runaway slave and abolitionist William Parker called "sleepless vigilance."
-- Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming, p. 198-199
... while white folk are in many instances just waking up, Black folk have been awake -- "woke" -- for centuries, and although that's a necessary virtue, it's also a huge burden. We have been under attack for so long that we dare not close our eyes even for a minute. We have had one long case of racial insomnia, watching over our families and communities, protecting them until a morning that never seems to come because there's always some other nightfall descending, some other consequence of white comfort that keeps us on the run, on the watch -- say, a dislike for affirmative action because it makes white folk uncomfortable to give up even a little unearned advantage, or a disdain for Black neighbors and the discomfort of encountering Black faces while fetching the morning paper. And when we managed to catch a few winks, our sleep was either riddled with nightmares or interrupted by the alarming persistence of defenders of white comfort railing against the quest for Black relief.
-- Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming, p. 197-198
... it is only natural that after waking up, white brothers and sisters want to share that awakening. But the comfort of being awakened on someone else's dime, on someone else's back, or in the case of George Floyd, on someone else's neck, must be brought up short with the realization that no matter how sincere such awakening is, it has arrived far into the history of Black people and our culture and struggle in this nation.
-- Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming, p. 196-197
