Emily Raboteau Quotes
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Here is a pragmatic and idealistic suggestion, White America! When you see my kids on the playground, on the street, can you remember to smile at them as you would smile at your own? Because believe me as your better angel already does they are every bit as lovable.
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Street floods are a regular nuisance in some low-lying areas of Queens like Hamilton Beach. Residents there have grown accustomed to swans and fish swimming in knee-high water in the middle of the road when the moon is full.
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I don't keep from despairing. I let myself despair. I just don't linger there for too long. There's too much to laugh about, two knuckleheads I have to feed, and a lot of really excellent television to watch. I think the mess we're in deserves the full range of human feeling, from despair to its opposite, which I would say is not hope, happiness, or peace, but freedom.
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Nowadays we can sidestep traditional media with social media and technology that allows us to become citizen journalists, to fight against injustice by showing what's shamefully going on.
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Acknowledging the realities of structural and institutional racism is hard for conscionable white people. It might ask them to consider how they're personally implicated, or have gained from systems that have oppressed and rejected others. It might require them to take a next step. It's easier to say, "I don't see race," or to dismiss the Black Lives Matter movement as structureless and theatrical than to embrace and promote its most basic premise, which is to believe that black lives have worth.
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Your average white liberal might agree with social justice in principle, and yet live quite comfortably as a "winner" in a nation whose social institutions - characterized by political exclusion, exploitation, and unequal access to resources - have systematically made others lose out. But here's the thing. Maybe it's time to get uncomfortable and upset. Maybe those feelings can be acted upon.
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I don't think of rejection as rejection, just a bad fit. Then I seek out other avenues of acceptance.
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I think it's really crucial to leave our American context, not only for a sense of individual freedom, but also to make links to international struggles for civil rights.
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I learned from James Baldwin that one can be a novelist, essayist, and activist, combined. That being critical of one's country is a way of loving it. That travel is crucial for perspective. That faith needn't be confined to organized religion.
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I look at my kids, who were born under a Black president, who hop around the living room naked and joyful, mimicking Simone Biles, and just think, Damn, they got some amazing role models of Black excellence.
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I felt saddened and confused to discover my favorite mural gone, but also hopeful that another one may be in the works. Street art is mysterious and impermanent like that. It can appear or disappear overnight. Murals like these are at risk of desecration, transformation, erasure. Someone's gonna piss on it, draw a mustache on it, tag it. The weather's going to make it fade. That's part of the beauty, I think. Murals have value without being precious.
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That mess about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin—that's some bullshit. Nobody has the right to judge anybody else. Period. If you ain't been in my skin, you ain't never gonna understand my character.
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It matters when public officials admit that their hearts have changed, but only in the service of changing actual policy.