Johny Pitts > Quotes

“to those used to a certain kind of privilege, equality can feel like oppression.”
― Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe

“For most black people in Europe, the battle against prejudice is for life, which is why you have to pace yourself to run a marathon instead of exerting all your energy in a spring if you want to survive — you can’t be throwing beer bottles at police and telling them to fuck themselves simply for the fun of it.”
― Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe

“structural racism – that is, racism that is inherent in a society, even if not consciously in individuals, because of the way it is organized to place white people in positions as bearers and inheritors of privilege accrued through exploitation.”
― Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe

“It's not terrorism when white people plot organised murders in the name of an extreme ideology.”
― Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe

“Those unemployed black men I saw loitering all over Europe weren’t inherently lazy, but lost and low on confidence and opportunities, and their crime was that they were visible, unlike the black staff who cleaned the station and whose hard work had rendered them invisible.”
― Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe

“These scattered fragments of Afropean experience had formed a mosaic inside my mind, not monolithic, but not entirely amorphous either, rather, the Afropean reality was a bricolage of blackness and I’d experienced an Africa that was both in and out of Europe.”
― Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe

“And he made this all too rare journey with hard work and focus on his craft, any anger or disenchantment found not in a Twitter rant but in subtle and well-considered arguments in beautifully written prose, in deep work that allows us to enter into the minds of those often written out of history.”
― Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe

“When I rebelled, even here in the ‘enlightened’ twenty-first century, I was lumbered with with the feeling that I was rebelling on the behalf on an entire people, and when I refrained from rebelling it was to challenge the opinion that I was proof of a black problem; acts of resistance considered fair game when enacted by white people assume a dangerous radical hue in the eyes of Western society when carried out by blacks. In essence, I wasn’t comfortable enough in my own skin in this Antifa stuff, partly because I felt the colour of that skin carried its own surplus surreality in the surroundings i grew up in; I could be wearing an Oxford shirt and chinos and driving a Toyota Prius, and still be enough of an outsider.”
― Johny Pitts

“How to Get Help with American Airlines Reservations?
Yes, you can change the name on your American Airlines flight ticket, but the process comes with specific guidelines +1(860) 590-4856 (USA) or +1(860) 590-4856 (UK). American Airlines allows minor corrections, such as fixing typos or updating a middle +1(860) 590-4856 (USA) or +1(860) 590-4856 (UK) name.”
― Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe

“As someone with enslavement in my heritage, I can’t help but feel haunted by these journeys of old money and the histories of inheritance,”
― Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe