Victor Ray > Quotes

“It’s tempting to hope that abandoning race as a descriptive category will lead to a post-racial utopia. But the belief that dropping racial categories will lead to transcending racial inequality relies on a basic misunderstanding of what social construction means.”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“Progress, when it has come for Black Americans, has typically come with equal or greater benefits for white Americans.”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“in American history. Those who think this fact has no place in our schools would—intentionally or not—hasten a return to unquestioned white dominance. We should never forget that it took National Guard soldiers to get Black and white kids seated together in American schools, that abstract notions of a colorblind Constitution weren’t a shield against slavery’s horrors or the savagery of lynching, that Jim Crow was a legal regime codifying racial subordination, and that civil rights wrested from white supremacy’s stingy fingers could be snatched back.”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will.[20”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“When there is massive unemployment in the black community, it’s called a social problem. But when there is massive unemployment in the white community, it’s called a depression. With the black man, it’s “welfare,” with the whites it’s “subsidies.” This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.[1”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“Racial ignorance is central to the current moral panic, but as a number of scholars have shown, some white Americans work hard to maintain their ignorance of racial reality.”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“part of a larger system of white supremacy.”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“That is, racial categories didn’t arise to explain difference; instead, racial categories used arbitrary physical differences to justify exploitation. Structural racism created race.”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“In Virginia, white parents were so opposed to integration that they closed the public schools for five years, denying their own kids access to public education rather than allowing them to learn alongside Black children.[6]”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“Even the Nazis, when attempting to define who counted as Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws, rejected the American one-drop model of racial classification as “too extreme.”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“In Mein Kampf, Hitler claimed that the United States’ race-based immigration policy was superior to Germany’s.”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“But America’s history is disturbing, and a healthy society would be disturbed. Banning discussions of structural racism is an unforgivably cruel type of structural racism designed to deny marginalized people both the affirmation that comes from learning their stories matter and the conceptual tools that help them understand and alter their position.”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“Authoritarian movements always target ideas and intellectuals that question the legitimacy of the social hierarchy upon which their worldview is built.”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“White folks protesting for their right to infect were willing to weigh the lives of disproportionately Black and Brown workers against their desire for a manicure, a haircut, a cup of coffee, or a tattoo.[13]”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.[3]”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care

“Even the mainstream definitions of racism are shaped by white identity politics.”
― Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care