Dashka Slater > Quotes

“Never let your obstacles become more important than your goal.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus

“Binary

There are two kinds of people in the world.
Male and Female.
Gay and Straight.
Black and White.
Normal and Weird.
Cis and Trans.
There are two kinds of people in the world.
Saints and Sinners.
Victims and Villains.
Cruel and Kind.
Guilty and Innocent.
There are two kinds of people in the world.
Just two.
Just two.
Only two.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus

“To forgive, you have to forget,” he counseled. “Because otherwise you haven’t truly forgiven.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“Because I’m going to make you understand the family motto: Never let your obstacles become more important than your goal.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“Two tongues in their mouths, the one they use to promise and the one they use to lie.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“On her walls she’d posted the family slogan: Never let your obstacles become more important than your goal. The goals: go to class, get your grades up, graduate, stay out of jail, survive.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“Even the brightest, best-meaning teenager doesn’t tend to think much beyond the moment, especially when they’re with their friends,” observes Gerstenfeld. As people grow”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“For me at least, genderqueer includes an aspect of questioning,” Sasha explains. “The fact that I was questioning my gender meant that I was genderqueer.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“That was the thing about restorative justice. It allowed you to hold two things in your head at the same time--that butt-slapping was funny, and also that it wasn't. That asking permission to touch somebody was funny, but that you really didn't want to be touched by somebody who didn't ask. That the girls wanted Jeff to dial back the ass-smacking thing, but that they still liked joking around with him. That the whole thing wasn't a big deal, and that it kind of was (239).”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus

“Sometimes I think the fear of dying is really a fear that you're not living the life you want.”
― Dashka Slater

“That’s not how the system works.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“Who in this world can you trust? When the guns are drawn, when the sun goes down, when you’re walking in the shadows, Who Can You Trust? People call themselves your friend. They say they were there but they weren’t there. Say they’re coming but they don’t show. Say they got your back as they get their knives out. Two tongues in their mouths, the one they use to promise and the one they use to lie. “I don’t have any friends,” Richard once said. “I have associates.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“Restorative justice is more interested in relationships. A crime is not act against a rule, it's an act against a person. When you harm somebody, you owe it to them to make things right. By making things right, you begin to heal your relationship with the community. Our system is focused on blame and punishment and not on healing and learning. - Lauren Abramson (RJ Program in Baltimore, MD)”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus

“People have different habitats,” he explained. “Some people have it better than others. They grew up in good neighborhoods. Their family has jobs. They have good income. They don’t understand. Their life is so good, they think everybody’s life is good. They don’t understand the struggles people go through. I don’t know where you grew up at, if it’s like a low-income area, where there’s a lot of violence and crime. But if you grew up in a low-income area and all you see is crime and drugs? If you have family that does crime? You see it. It has an impact on you. If you’re around it a lot, it’s hard to do good.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“Studies show that more than 90 percent of juveniles who are interrogated by police don't wait to talk to a lawyer and don't understand the rights the police have read them.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus

“The proponents of hate-crime laws are liberals, and yet they are the ones who are the biggest critics of mass incarceration,” observes James B. Jacobs, director of New York University’s Center for Research in Crime and Justice, and an expert on hate-crime laws. “So there are ironies piled on ironies. The remedy here is imprisonment, and prisons are the ultimate incubators of antisocial attitudes.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“Our system is focused on blame and punishment and not on healing and learning,”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“When you are targeted for who you are, it doesn't just hurt your feelings. It hurts every cell in your body.”
― Dashka Slater, Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed

“[Dan, Sasha's savior on the bus visits after the accident] Remember this: All your life you're going to want your parents off your back. Then you realize when you get older, they're the ones that had your back.

(YOU had my back -Sasha said.
Dan shut his eyes for a moment.)”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus

“Until this moment, it's quite possible you've never thought about the value of your attention-what it earns and what it costs. Maybe you'll start thinking about it now. What you follow, like, comment, what exactly are you saying? What ar you saying when you don't say anything at all?”
― Dashka Slater

“The very last part of the brain to get myelinated is the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for reason, planning, and deliberation. So while teenage emotions have gone into hyperdrive, reason and logic are still obeying the speed limit. The result is that while teenagers can make decisions that are just as mature, reasoned, and rational as adults’ decisions in normal circumstances, their judgment can be fairly awful when they are feeling intense emotions or stress, conditions that psychologists call hot cognition. In those situations, teens are more likely to make decisions with the limbic system rather than the prefrontal cortex.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“Accountability is actually a conversations about what happened, why it happened, and how do we prevent it from happening again.”
― Dashka Slater, Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed

“Lynchings—they’re hate crimes,” he said. “But the kid who thinks that [wearing a skirt] is anomalous and decides to play a prank is not committing a hate crime.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“The result is that while teenagers can make decisions that are just as mature, reasoned, and rational as adults’ decisions in normal circumstances, their judgment can be fairly awful when they are feeling intense emotions or stress, conditions that psychologists call hot cognition. In those situations, teens are more likely to make decisions with the limbic system rather than the prefrontal cortex. The presence of peers is one of the things that raises the emotional stakes, making it more likely that teens will seek out risk and short-term reward without pausing to consider the consequences.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“Transgender people are the victims of an astonishing amount of violence. One out of every four trans people has experienced a bias-driven assault, and the numbers are higher for trans women, trans people of color, and nonbinary people. Of the 860 nonbinary people who responded to the 2008 National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 32 percent had been physically assaulted.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“but there are many languages on earth that are basically gender neutral, using the same word for he, she, and it, or not using pronouns at all. You’ve probably heard of some of them. They include: Armenian, Comanche, Finnish, Hungarian, Hindi, Indonesian, Quechua, Thai, Tagalog, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Yoruba.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

“On the average, a black man, woman or child was murdered nearly once a week, every week, between 1882 and 1930 by a hate-driven white mob,” sociologists Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck write in A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930.”
― Dashka Slater, Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed

“If you have a lot of obsessions, a lot of things you really like, the opportunity for best days ever increases.”
― Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus

“Banning the kind of speech you find offensive, in other words, opens the possibility that someone else will gain the power to restrict speech they find offensive...”
― Dashka Slater

“Black people could be lynched for being too successful or too outspoken, for owning property that white people wanted, for attempting to collect their wages or other debts from white people who didn’t want to pay, for asking for food, or simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. While lynchings sometimes happened under cover of darkness, they were often public occasions in which the person who was lynched was tortured and dismembered before a mob of enthusiastic onlookers. Sometimes they were advertised in advance so that photographers would have time to set up their equipment. Later, photos of the corpses would be sold as souvenirs.”
― Dashka Slater, Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed