Lori

“You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered. If all young adults were required to spend two weeks in a foreign country, two-thirds of the world's diplomatic problems could be solved. It wouldn't matter what country they visited or what they did during their stays.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“[P]laces that seem lovely at first glance may actually be sinister, but places that feel sinister seldom turn out to be lovely.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“A witness can be of more value than a policy analyst. An amateur witness, free of conceptual bias, sometimes sees the plainest truth. One should never be blinded by tailoring.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far & Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years

“You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me