Elijah Dougherty

“It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“But to say this -- that mainstream liberal parties will never develop a moral compass until they are punished for not having one -- produces a level of antagonistic vitriol unmatched in almost any other context. Waves of progressives will take time out from pasting MY RELIGION IS LOVE stickers to the bumpers of their Teslas to let you know that advocating this position makes you the enemy, that they hope you're happy when Trump takes power and makes your life even more miserable, that you should just go back to where you came from.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“But the word "radicalize" feels wrong, seems to imply an element of extremism, as though rage at this kind of blatant hypocrisy is the abnormal thing, when what is plainly abnormal is to accept it.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This