HeatherIlene

“But reconciliation is not about white feelings. It’s about diverting power and attention to the oppressed, toward the powerless. It’s not enough to dabble at diversity and inclusion while leaving the existing authority structure in place. Reconciliation demands more.”
― Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

“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

“Reconciliation is the pursuit of the impossible—an upside-down world where those who are powerful have relinquished that power to the margins. It’s reimagining an entirely different way of being with one another. Reconciliation requires imagination. It requires looking beyond what is to what could be. It looks beyond intentions to real outcomes, real hurts, real histories.”
― Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

“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