HeatherIlene

“This is the consistent function of racist ideas—and of any kind of bigotry more broadly: to manipulate us into seeing people as the problem, instead of the policies that ensnare them.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites,” Enlightenment philosopher David Hume wrote in 1753. “There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white…. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“The moment Black Americans achieved freedom from enslavement, America could have put to death the idea of Black inferiority. But whiteness was not prepared to sober up from the drunkenness of power over another people group. Whiteness was not ready to give up the ability to control, humiliate, or do violence to any Black body in the vicinity—all without consequence.”
― Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

“He was curious about what might be so valuable to the humans that we were willing to die for it. He didn’t understand when I told him it was no power beyond knowledge—no weapon beyond learning.”
― Sarah J. Maas, House of Flame and Shadow