Jabari Asim > Quotes

“What y'all ladies got to share? Hmmm, what you bitches got?"

Aunt Georgia sighed and squinted at the boy. She said, "The Lord loves a cheerful giver, but I'm just not in the mood."

The thug moved his hand from his crotch to his scalp, still scratching. "What in the hell's that supposed to mean?" Mrs. Cleveland raised and pumped her walking stick, which, it turned out, was a double-barreled shotgun.

"It means take one more step," she said, "and I'll blast you to hell, you ignorant-ass bastard.”
― Jabari Asim, A Taste of Honey: Stories

“Will this ever be over?" "In time. When the Thieves find something else worth stealing." "And then what?" "They'll tell the Stolen that they dreamed it all up. That the worst things never happened.”
― Jabari Asim, Yonder

“Making the nation safe for white people could be more easily accomplished with the help of a whitewashed tale of its origins.”
― Jabari Asim, The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why

“I did infer, however, that submitting to melancholy would undo the labors of those who had come before me, that I had an obligation to resist instead of giving in. I rose unsteadily to my feet, aware of my shackles, but determined to somehow overcome them.”
― Jabari Asim, Yonder

“opprobrious term, employed to impose contempt upon”
― Jabari Asim, The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why

“I wanted to belong to Iris when I didn't even belong to myself.”
― Jabari Asim, Yonder

“The unbound black body is profoundly inconvenient.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“I look at Wheatley, born in West Africa in 1753, and then to DuBois, who died there 210 years later. Between them I see a shimmering filament of resourcefulness and determination, the invisible cable that connects our past to our present.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“We might realize that as long as there is hunger and other people have knowledge of it; as long as there is killing for sport; as long as there is predatory lending and for-profit policing; as long as citizens remain silent while watching their nominal leaders build fortunes on the backs of the poor and defenseless; as long as there is hoarding of material goods by human beings fully aware that other human beings are dying of lack; there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all morality.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“If we’re looking for reasons for optimism, we can find it in knowing our opponents, despite centuries of concentrated, systematic effort, have failed to completely destroy our minds, our capacity to reason for ourselves. We can find it in our ability to have strong, smart, healthy children despite equally intense efforts to poison, incarcerate, murder and otherwise inflict them with fatal discouragement. I need no reasons beyond those to motivate my striving.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“To me death was not the spectacle it might have been in some other circumstance, in some other place. It was not something to get used to but something to expect, like hunger, loneliness, and the cruelty of Thieves. You could not let it shake you.”
― Jabari Asim, Yonder

“The bloodthirsty impulse — the desire to see the dark body suffer — shared by many of those who benefit from unfair advantage based on skin color may prove impossible to rehabilitate, a prospect that many of us are reluctant to acknowledge or confront.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“Others who have written on the Age of Thievery and even some diarists who lived through it have opined that the Stolen could seldom tell one Thief from another, that to us they all looked and smelled alike. Here I must call that assertion false. Our survival depended on discerning their thoughts and remaining a step in advance whenever possible. Accordingly, knowing the subtle distinctions between them was a matter of life or death, and so we studied them with care, often committing their faces, gestures and scents to memory.”
― Jabari Asim, Yonder

“The problem with sweeping generalizations is they risk excluding art and artists who should be inside, not out.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“But in their initial jubilation they struggled to withstand a new reality in which they stood unshackled but remained unfree.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“It remains a profound and perhaps interminable paradox that African-Americans are constantly striving to prove themselves worthy of citizenship in a country that has not proved itself ready for democracy. I’m intrigued and mystified by the enduring popularity of moral appeals and dutiful citizenship, especially while the movement for black lives has worked so hard to consign the politics of respectability to the dustbin of outdated ideas.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“She looked up and saw, crouching on a branch, a creature from another world.”
― Jabari Asim, Yonder

“The fact that blackness can incorporate such things as technique, practice and the conscious application of style while simultaneously transcending all those things makes it nearly impossible to pin down. As a result, it often infuses American life as more of a tantalizing abstraction than a concrete attribute, some intangible quality derived from black people’s history not on this continent but on this planet. Anyone who’s seen the Norfolk State marching band, a New Orleans second line or three black girls turning double-dutch knows what I mean.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“Sometimes I picture in my mind a crimson thread originating in Africa, unspooling alongside a young boy stumbling and choking as his coffle yanks him toward the sea. The thread extends apparently without end, through the bloody spill of centuries and across fruited plains and fetid plantations, trailing the double-time stomp of a black Union soldier and continuing to unspool beside the swollen ankles of a church matron marching her way from Selma to Montgomery.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“Have you chosen your new name?”
“I have a notion. How about you?”
“I’m thinking on it but I haven’t settled. Tell me yours.”
I reached for his hand, laced his fingers in mine. “As you said, it’s too soon,” I
told him. “Not until freedom. Then we tell.”
― Jabari Asim, Yonder

“I resolved to die. When that proved futile, I joined the ranks of the sullen. My condition was not uncommon among men and women in our predicament. We moved as if lost in dreams, we ate without tasting, slept without resting, listened without hearing. Others avoided us for fear of catching our ailment because they knew that not caring meant not living and they had chosen to live.”
― Jabari Asim, Yonder

“Reading the novel the first time, I felt as if I was peeking at a blackface party through a frat-house window. Reading it again produced the same sensation.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“Perhaps this is a moment for impassioned African-American critics to take up the mantle of their predecessors and examine the fraudulent underpinnings of American morality once again. To cast aside 'abiding faith' and interrogate the 'bombast and fraud' that Douglass identified in 1852. To question America’s fundamental pretenses, as Fannie Lou Hamer did in 1964.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“In the 21st century, when strutting where one chooses is still seen as intolerable black impudence, police officers become gun-wielding surrogates. Licensed to kill, they can exorcise collective white hysteria by inflicting violence on our dark skins. In addition to satisfying a psychological urge, policing of the black body performs a critical economic function by supplying the nation’s need for cheap captive labor and fodder for the prison-industrial complex. For these and other reasons, African-Americans move through space fully aware of this fact: Police officers break the black body with the reliable blessing of the state.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“The sight of prayerful Negroes in church clothes kneeling before bloodthirsty troopers has undoubtedly awakened sympathy in some previously hardened racists. However, little evidence suggests that spit-shined activism has ever swayed a crucial majority of white Americans.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“We continue to write — and resist. In the tradition of black bards known and unknown, we compose with purposeful fury. We muster our candor and eloquence against a master narrative advising us to patiently attend those who continue to cling so eagerly to anti-black racism, to sit with folded hands and hear them out.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“The prospect of artists censoring other artists is more nauseating than having to suffer the output of creators whose reach exceeds their grasp.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“Do oppressed people have an irresistible impulse to forgive? Does forgiveness free us from some larger burden, enabling us to cope with the daily struggle? Or perhaps it keeps the hot coal of anger from burning our palms, as the Buddha would have it? Loving our oppressors is so much a part of the African-American consciousness that to question it is to risk censure of the harshest kind. It’s a form of masochism, kissing the sword that has just sliced you open.”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival

“Waking quickly, I leapt to the ground and looked directly into the eyes of the Savage. He looked entirely different, calm somehow; all traces of lunacy had vanished from his expression. His mouth, usually slack and oblivious to the ever-present flies, had formed a sly smile, his lips curved and tight with purpose. These he opened and uttered the first word I’d ever heard him speak. “Run,” he said. “Run.” I had seconds to obey him before flames devoured the entire conveyance.”
― Jabari Asim, Yonder

“The 'mainstream' press, suffering from an embarrassing lack of diversity, did little to resist the tsunami, using 'working class' as a euphemism for white people, often uncritically accepting police accounts of shootings involving unarmed black people, and showing a woeful reluctance to identify racists as the unprincipled degenerates they are. The dithering over the appropriateness of using 'alt-right,' 'white nationalist,' etc. is a sideshow that helps us to avoid the fundamental questions that must be confronted: Is voting for a racist itself a racist act? Can one commit a racist act and not be a racist?”
― Jabari Asim, We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival