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