Roxy Manning > Quotes

“It shifts the ‘blame’ for our feelings of discomfort from the existence of these conditions to the person who calls our awareness to the conditions. Instead of saying, ‘I feel distressed that these inequities exist in the world,’ people instead say, ‘I feel distressed that you made me think about these conditions.”
― Roxy Manning, How to Have Antiracist Conversations: Embracing Our Full Humanity to Challenge White Supremacy

“White people must show up and be willing to step out of the safe shelter that whiteness and the lack of direct impact can afford them. . . . For white people, in addition to all the reasons described earlier, risking is a form of solidarity.”
― Roxy Manning, How to Have Antiracist Conversations: Embracing Our Full Humanity to Challenge White Supremacy

“If violence or harm occurs as the result of someone’s attempt to meet their needs, leaving their needs out of any solution will only result in them trying even harder to get those needs met, at perhaps greater cost.”
― Roxy Manning, How to Have Antiracist Conversations: Embracing Our Full Humanity to Challenge White Supremacy

“When I can see you as a person who did something that resulted in harm without seeing you as an essentially evil person, I am more likely to advocate for strategies that include your well-being in the repair that is being sought.”
― Roxy Manning, How to Have Antiracist Conversations: Embracing Our Full Humanity to Challenge White Supremacy

“The moralistic judgments we have learned to impose on others serve us, but at a great cost. They support us in noticing when something is not working for us and taking actions to change that behavior. However, moralistic judgments move us away from Beloved Community because they make it all too easy to lump folks into an ‘other, bad’ group that we don’t have to care about or engage with.”
― Roxy Manning, How to Have Antiracist Conversations: Embracing Our Full Humanity to Challenge White Supremacy

“. . . I imagine the person they are describing as someone who is desperately trying to raise awareness that might lead to change; someone who is yearning to be met with some response that acknowledges their experiences and the severe impact they have felt. And instead, this person is consistently met with messages that do the opposite. ‘Yes, this is important, but you shouldn’t raise your voice in staff meetings. Everyone has a right to a safe workplace.’ Can you imagine how you might feel if that’s the response you get when you raise your voice because you have been repeatedly harmed? The underlying message the person from the Global Majority might perceive is ‘It’s okay if you or people like you experience harm while we figure out some ways to look at this problem that keep everyone else emotionally safe. Everyone but you deserves a safe workplace.’”
― Roxy Manning, How to Have Antiracist Conversations: Embracing Our Full Humanity to Challenge White Supremacy

“When we name the huge costs and disparities that result from practices embedded in white supremacy beliefs, we bring to life an awareness of the practices, not the practices themselves. With greater awareness, we can seek to eradicate them. Communities that don’t collect or track data on race in education, housing, employment, and more might find it easy to say that they don’t have problems with race. However, with the statistics gathered by Equal Justice Initiative and other organizations, it’s clear that these problems do exist, but there is no way to talk about them without it being dismissed as anecdotal.”
― Roxy Manning, How to Have Antiracist Conversations: Embracing Our Full Humanity to Challenge White Supremacy