Mychal Denzel Smith > Quotes

“And the more the image of black men is connected to everything wrong with the world, the easier it is to justify killing us. Racism comes to be seen as a natural reaction to the existence of black monsters.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

“What would we happen if we reframed the way we understand black male life in a way that took mental health seriously? If we looked outside and didn't see ruthless gangbangers, but teenage boys left hopeless and giving themselves suicide missions. If instead of chastising young men for fighting over sneakers we asked why they felt worthless and unseen without them. If we didn't label them junkies, but rather recognized their need for affirmation.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

“Anger is what makes our struggle visible, and our struggle is what exposes they hypocrisy of a nation that fashions itself a moral leader. To rise against the narrative and expose the lie gives opportunity to those whose identity depends on the lie to question and, hopefully, change.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

“Our struggle has inspired oppressed people the world over, because if former slaves can make the most powerful nation face itself, there's a chance for everyone else. In a twist, our rage becomes hope for others.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

“We shouldn't be seeking the respect of an unjust system that will not respect us on the basis of our humanity alone.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

“The nigger is America's greatest asset and its biggest fear”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

“He did everything. He studied hard. He went to Harvard. He got married. He had children. He worked. He dreamed big. He pulled his bootstraps all the way up from his humble beginnings to the presidency. He lived the American Dream. And he was called an African Witch Doctor. People asked for his birth certificate. A congressman shouted at him "YOU LIE!" He faced the most recalcitrant Republican Congress ever that was elected by a constituency that wanted to "take the country back."If a black man can be elected as guardian of the American empire, do exactly that, and still not be shielded from racism, what hope is supposed to be left?”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

“To my Newly Forming Black Radical mind, women -- more specifically black women -- had a way of existing without being present. It's a natural result of consuming history and culture through the fables of masculine triumph.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

“One of the privileges of not being a part of a marginalized group is believing you can set your own benchmarks for bigotry.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

“We make a grave mistake every time we invoke the history of oppression to diminish the reality of racism's present. Progress is real, but the narrative of progress seduces us into inaction. If we believe, simply, that it gets better, there is no incentive to do the work to ensure that it does.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

“He failed to appeal to the American ego, to be a cheerleader for American exceptionalism.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“There are those of us who can retreat to a fantastical America, and those of us who are always here—stuck.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“But the anger has not only drawn attention to injustice; it has driven people to action, sparking movements and spurring them forward. At the very least, the public expression of black rage has allowed communities and people who have felt isolated in their own anger to know that they are not alone. Anger is what makes our struggle visible.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

“Anger is what makes our struggle visible, and our struggle is what exposes the hypocrisy of a nation that fashions itself a moral leader. To rise against the narrative and expose the lie gives opportunity to those whose identity depends on the lie to question and, hopefully, change.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

“The most insidious and remarkable quality of American mythmaking is the ability to swallow up the lives of those who stood in open rebellion to the American project and turn them into obedient symbols of American exceptionalism.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“The problem is when progress becomes its own ideology—that is, when advocacy for incrementalism is seen as the astute and preferred mode of political transformation. It is never easy to win, but progress is also never sufficient. Incremental change keeps the grinding forces of oppression—death—in place. Actively advocating for this position is a moral failure.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“The police are no solution, but they are, as it were, the final solution. It matters what you see as the problems in need of solving. Is it the people or the conditions? Is it blackness or anti-blackness? Is it poverty or the poor?”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“One of the more pernicious effects of racism on the psyche is the constant questioning of one’s worth and purpose.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

“justice is a proactive commitment to providing each person with the material and social conditions in which they can both survive and thrive as a healthy and self-actualized human being. This is not an easy thing to establish, as it requires all of us buying into the idea that we must take responsibility for one another. But it is the only form of a just world.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“Reduced to an apolitical dreamer, he can be a tool to divert energy away from forming structural solutions to inequality and injustice while spreading grade-school-level bromides in favor of kindness.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“Everything I read, listened to, and learned, validated my right to existence as a Black man in America but only within the confines of a patriarchal definition of masculine identity. What went unquestioned were the ways my newfound sense of Black manhood contributed to the ongoing marginalization of my mother, her twin sister, my grandmother, my high school guidance counselor, and more than half of the student population on Hampton University’s campus. I began to see myself, but only by refusing to see black women. The centrality of the Black male experience and the discourse of racist oppression has been passed down from generation to generation through our politics and culture.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

“Donald Trump so undermines the idea of the president as agnostic leader that George W. Bush has come back around as a shining example of it. The scandals of the Trump White House move with such rapidity that nostalgia has set in for when they appeared only every few months. Trump has been so openly bigoted toward Muslims that Bush quotes about respecting Islam—absented the context of his all-out assault on majority Muslim countries—garner retroactive praise. Trump lies so much in service of himself that Bush’s lies in service of empire are noble by comparison. You can indulge this delusion if you don’t live in Iraq or New Orleans. Or if you didn’t lose your home because of predatory lending and treacherous Wall Street gambling. Then Bush can be your cuddly grandpa.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“academics, media professionals, policymakers, presidents—excuse the presence of the police here, and in other hoods like this one, because it is their position that in order to stop the violence of the hood you must impose the violence of the state. The police are meant, from this view, to protect the people from themselves, to enforce the discipline their culture lacks.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“No matter what other responsibilities police have assumed, they have consistently inflicted violence on the most marginalized people in society and maintained the economic, political, and social dominance of the ruling class. When I say they have not strayed too far from these roots, I mean precisely that the main function of policing has not changed. It is still an institution built on the principle of using violence to ensure that people who are exploited by the ruling class are unable to assert any pressure on their oppressors. The”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“I had athletes who, with much to lose, would put their visibility to use for the liberation of Black people.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

“Abolition offers an alternative framework for thinking through how we care for everyone who is harmed, and for considering how to reduce and prevent harm from occurring. Prison is not a means of preventing violence, but for shifting it out of sight from polite society. In this way, it becomes harder to convince a society convinced of its own politeness that a confrontation with prison is necessary. Out of sight, and so on.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“Contrary to what personal finance charlatans would have us believe, poverty is not a mindset—it is the inevitable and necessary by-product of a system wherein life is only guaranteed to those who have wealth and wealth is distributed via ownership and not labor. Poverty is a capitalist’s main resource, as it ensures there will always be a class of people to exploit.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“It would be a tremendous shame for the wealthiest nation in human history to admit that the wealth it has built came at a dreadful cost to the majority of people who live here. It would reveal the lie of the whole system.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“It is only logical, from the standpoint of the empire, to swallow up anything that may threaten its existence. Dissent is inevitable but need not be destructive. By co-opting the heroes of insurgence, the empire is able to bolster its constructed moral authority.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream

“Dr. King’s treatment as an “infallible oracle” is not laziness; his perceived infallibility is related to the message he has been chosen to deliver. Reduced to an apolitical dreamer, he can be a tool to divert energy away from forming structural solutions to inequality and injustice while spreading grade-school-level bromides in favor of kindness.”
― Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream