Monica Potts > Quotes

“When girls don’t act in the ways they’re expected to or when they are perceived to be acting out, they’re punished.[*2] Any one individual teacher might not be sexist or racist, but the education system is: teachers belong to the same culture as everyone else, and it can shape the way they view behavior and achievement. School can become a place where society’s problems are replicated. Teachers call on boys more often than girls, the Sadkers documented, and pay attention to their students in slightly different ways: they compliment girls on their clothing but boys on their achievements. Girls succeed or struggle in school according to the expectations society sets for them. Sometimes these attitudes are explicit, but more often they’re humming quietly in the background, unnoticed. The hum grows louder and clearer over the years, until we find ourselves singing the same song, uncertain of how we learned it. I”
― Monica Potts, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America

“no two people were ever more different, or more inseparable, than sisters close in age.”
― Monica Potts, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America

“In the warfare over sex, the fear is typically one of three kinds: fear of increasing women’s freedom, especially over their own bodies…white Protestant fear of encroaching religious or ethnic ‘others,’…and a widespread and easily stoked fear that America is a once great nation now pitched into grave decline, largely because of the evil activities (very often, evil sexual activities) of some of its own citizens.”
― Monica Potts, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America

“one should read them.[*] This is how religion becomes less a personal belief system than a tool”
― Monica Potts, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America

“But when evangelical voters talk about values, they mean public values, not their personal relationship with Jesus. According to Christian values, a public school should ban all the books with naughty words in them, because if you believe God would object to those books, then no one should read them.[*] This is how religion becomes less a personal belief system than a tool for social control.”
― Monica Potts, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America

“why and how students make college decisions, told me that the middle- and upper-income high school students she interviewed almost never brought up the issue of nearness to home. But low-income students were accustomed both to family emergencies and to being part of their family’s solution to them, a grown-up burden their wealthier counterparts did not have to bear.”
― Monica Potts, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America

“Property rights, land ownership, and gun ownership are all tied up in this political worldview. It doesn’t matter to people in Clinton how destitute they are, how fundamentally poor the soil is, how frayed its social safety net. It doesn’t matter that the antigovernment sentiment they espouse is heading to a nihilistic endpoint calling on the government to cut valuable programs they use themselves. Or that their outrage over taxation only helps the kind of wealthy people who don’t live in Clinton. It doesn’t matter to them that they have more in common with poor people of color than with rich white people. The white women in this community don’t seem concerned that the systems they support shield their abusers and circumscribe their lives. Their inheritance came down to them as land, so that’s what they want to protect. They concentrate on their own personal redemption, even as their communities are dying. It makes them withdraw from one another, ever further from a sense of community, so that people like Darci, who suffer the most, struggle to find anything safe to grab on to.”
― Monica Potts, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America

“In the 1980s, rapid disinvestment from America’s cities, white flight into suburbs, rising crime, and punitive policing practices left primarily Black Americans living in urban centers and hence more vulnerable to drug epidemics, which sweep in after basic institutions abandon an area. Today vulnerable populations are spread beyond cities to rural parts of the country, as entire economies and societies collapse and people flee. This is a particularly American disease. Rather than use our society’s vast wealth and resources to lift all people up, we are letting more and more people fall down. It is in our country’s DNA to blame societal failings on the individuals who suffer from them the most and to think of addiction as a personal moral failing and to ignore the societal conditions that drive it.”
― Monica Potts, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America