HeatherIlene

“For only by being truthful about how we got here can we begin to imagine another way.”
― Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

“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

“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