Quote of the Day

Families are like little villages.  You know where everything is, you know how everything works, your identity is fixed, and you can't really leave, or connect with anything or anybody outside, until you're physically no longer there.

-- Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band, p. 59

Quote of the Day

Research backs this up: unbridled positivity in an experience of failure or distress makes people feel worse, not better.  What ours and the experience of many others also confirms is that putting a positive spin on something difficult usually winds up feeling like an effort to get the griever to stop talking about it, making the griever shut down (and stop calling you).

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 205

Quote of the Day

Changing our cruel, childish dynamics is not anything that can be legislated.  A new, inclusive, and compassionate politic must be lived by more and more people every day, free from the institutions that would enthrall them.  It's got to start with each and every one of us.  We need to include in our loving, caring, generous, and compassionate lives people who share our loving, caring, generous, and compassionate values, no matter their race or politics or religion, no matter their gender or sexuality.  We need to work on behalf of everyone who's being oppressed by a system we bought into as children and never bothered to change.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 58

Quote of the Day

One of the greatest privileges of whiteness is not to see color, not to see race, and not to pay a price for ignoring it, except, of course, when you're called on it.  But even then, that price pales, quite literally, in comparison to the high price black folk pay for being black.  We pay a price, too, for not even being able to derive recognition, and financial reward, for the styles that make the world want to be black so bad that they don't mind looking like us, as long as they never, ever have to be us. 

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 86

Quote of the Day

... to overcome my own hypersensitivity, I had no choice but to turn fearless.

-- Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band, p. 14

Quote of the Day

It can be hard for the optimistically inclined among us to hear, but optimistic reactions, ones that people who are grieving might consider irrationally optimistic, can be even tougher to bear than pessimistic reactions.  For people in crisis, ill-timed optimism just feels like a meaningless empty platitude, especially for a situation that really might not get better.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 204-205

Quote of the Day

I am saying that everyone would benefit from a change in the dynamic that oppresses us all in one way or another.  I am asking you to do something, anything, every day to change the way we as a culture have been dealing with difference.

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 57-58

Quote of the Day

When some of you say, "I don't see color," you are either well-intending naifs or willful race evaders.  In either case you don't help the cause.  The failure to see color only benefits white America.  A world without color is a world without racial debt.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 86

Quote of the Day

When you want to reach out to a person going through something that you've also experienced yourself, you can now see why it's a good idea to restrain your normal, but incredibly unhelpful impulse to compare your situations.  If you don't feel prepared to handle someone else's difficulty because of the intense feelings it brings up about your own...explore other ways of being there for your friend that don't involve much talking about it.  And if you want to talk about the feelings that are coming up for you as a result of a friend's difficult time, talk to others about what's going on -- not your suffering friend.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 198

Quote of the Day

I think, instead, we should try something like this: "Excuse me...I hope I'm not interrupting," and only when we've determined that we're truly not interrupting someone or intruding on their privacy, do we proceed to ask, "I find you fascinating and so different from me.  Might I ask you what your life's been like?  I think we could learn something from each other."  How about that for putting aside childish ways that no longer work in the lives of kind, generous, inclusive adults?  Isn't that easy?

-- Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, p. 56-57

Quote of the Day

The appropriation of "minority" cultures by white writers with a political advantage leaves people of color little room to speak their truths in their own ways.

-- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop, p. 84

Quote of the Day

Unless you actually are an expert, whose expertise is being asked for, hearing news of someone's crisis is not the time to offer up casual theories about their misfortune.

-- Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell, There Is No Good Card for This, p. 197