Wesley Lowery > Quotes

“And by focusing on the character of the victim, we inadvertently take the focus off the powerful and instead train our eyes and judgment on the powerless.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“the protest chants were never meant to assert the innocence of every slain black man and woman. The protests were an assertion of their humanity and a demand for a system of policing and justice that was transparent, equitable, and fair.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“While some nations vow never to forget, our American battle has always been over what we allow ourselves to remember.

Our historical record, we know, is subjective. Not every account is written down. The distinction between equity and injustice, riot and uprising, hinges on whose hand holds the pen. So often, it seems, our history is hiding from us, preventing the possibility that we dare look back and tell the truth--afraid of what doing so may require of us now.”
― Wesley Lowery, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“What we expected of the Obama administration was beyond what the framework of the presidency allowed.”
― Wesley Lowery, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

“The years that followed Obama’s election would see two long-simmering racial movements burst to the fore of mainstream politics. The first of these was a nativist movement of white Americans that questioned the validity of the president’s citizenship, his Christian faith, and his fidelity to America itself. For his eight years in office, Obama would have no more consistent and persistent foe. This opposition was fanned by leaders on the political Right—many of them media figures, some of them elected officials—who preached a politics of racial agitation: fear of immigrants and Muslims, contempt for black public figures and elected officials, and rebellion against government attempts to address racial inequalities. This movement wielded inflammatory rhetoric to appeal to the real fear held by many Americans, of varying political affiliations, that the country had irreversibly changed in ways that left them unheard and underserved, exposed and vulnerable.”
― Wesley Lowery, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

“Our history is simply a story that we tell ourselves. So often the tale that we tell is a lie.”
― Wesley Lowery, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

“The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement,” writes historian Carol Anderson in White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, in which she chronicles the rejection by a significant portion of the white populace of the civil rights advancements and victories of the Second Reconstruction. “White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. . . . It can look like white flight and private schools and city ordinances and neighborhood watches.”
― Wesley Lowery, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

“Insisting that the burden of proof rests with the body of the slain black man or woman is to argue that black life, on its own, does not matter.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“In fifty years America had gone from being a country in which a black man named Barack Obama would likely have been unable to cast a ballot for president to a country in which he was elected president.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“The theory is that legitimacy can only be earned through a long-suffering and constant presence. But that view is limiting in that it forecloses on the possibility that at times change is most effectively spurred by a fresh set of critical eyes.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“Every social movement must grapple with the generational and tactical divides that arise between varying groups and factions that comprise the ground troops.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“A seat at the table, the new generation of black activists reasons, isn’t worth much if your fellow diners still refuse to pass you a plate.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“the advent of multiracial democracy through the Second Reconstruction and the perceived browning of America through immigration has forced today’s white supremacists to accept as a premise that they’re “losing.” No longer can they claim, as their forebears did, that they aim to return to the norm of a white supremacist status quo. Today’s white supremacist movement is revolutionary—its explicit aim being to overthrow our maturing multiracial democracy.”
― Wesley Lowery, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

“As President Obama's second term toiled on, it became increasingly clear that talk of a postracial America was no more than cheap political punditry.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“There is nothing that can prepare a family for the heart-clenching shock of losing one of their own. And time and time again, those left behind described to me how so suddenly a normal, mundane weekday had become the worst day of their lives -- a black hole of time permanently etched in the video feed of their lives.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“In a post-Ferguson world, young black activists were eager to work outside the system. “I voted for Barack Obama twice,” Tef Poe said that evening. “And still got teargassed.” A seat at the table, the new generation of black activists reasons, isn’t worth much if your fellow diners still refuse to pass you a plate.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“A shortsighted framing, divorced from historical context, led us to litigate and relitigate each specific detail of the shooting without fully grasping the groundswell of pain and frustration fuming from the pores of the people of Ferguson -- which also left us blindsided by what was to come.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“success isn’t always defined by victory.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“It’s like we’re not even human to them,”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“The protests had created a countermovement of skepticism, anger and hate, driven by some who genuinely believed that the coverage of Ferguson was overblown and amplified by others with more sinister motivations.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“Ferguson would birth a movement and set the nation on a course for a still-ongoing public hearing on race that stretched far past the killing of unarmed residents--from daily policing to Confederate imagery to respectability politics to cultural appropriation. The social justice movement spawned from Mike Brown's blood would force city after city to grapple with its own fraught histories of race and policing.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“While some nations vow never to forget, our American battle has always been over what we allow ourselves to remember.”
― Wesley Lowery, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“Justice is a hard concept to wrestle with when your eyes are filled with scenes of death.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“If it doesn't matter how the police -- the system -- treats you, does it matter how you treat them?”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“As was the case in Ferguson, the media became as much a motivating factor as the death itself. While cable news talking heads often declare that the media is to blame for mass protests--arguing that if the cameras would go away, so would the demonstrators--the logic is only partially correct, and it diagnoses the wrong root cause. Many of those who take to the street and demand justice do emerge in response to the media, but it's not necessarily because they want to get on camera (although many of the protesters happily embrace the chance to step under the bright lights and speak their piece). Rather, many in these communities show up in the streets because they do not recognise the way their home is being depicted on their television sets. They are upset and offended by what they are hearing and reading about their community. They emerge to serve as ombudsmen, correct the record, tell their own stories. The people who took to the streets were, in many ways, protesting not only the death of Freddie Gray, but also the way his life and death had been portrayed in the media.”
― Wesley Lowery

“We live in a country where police violence is a pervasive fixture of daily life, not a problem plaguing some distant locale.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“Social media made it possible for young black people to document interactions they believed to be injustices, and exposed their white friends and family members to their experiences.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“We fall into the fallacy of believing we can litigate the complicated story before us into a black-and-white binary of good guys and bad guys. There are no isolated incidents, yet the media's focus on the victim and the officer inadvertently erases the context of the nation's history as it relates to race, policing, and training for law enforcement. And by focusing on the character of the victim, we inadvertently take the focus off the powerful and instead train our eyes and judgment on the powerless.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“Power is never given, it's taken." It is an open secret that there exists a conflict between a new generation of young black leadership and a black establishment reluctant to give up power they spent decades fighting to secure.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“The distinction between equity and injustice, riot and uprising, hinges on whose hand holds the pen.”
― Wesley Lowery, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019