kiomi

“Why don’t my parents have normal rules? Why don’t they eat normal food? Why don’t they wear normal clothes? Why can’t they just be normal? These questions are xenophobic. It took me a long time to be proud of where I came from.”
― Ziwe Fumudoh, Black Friend: Essays

“Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“For resistance to succeed, two boundaries must be crossed. First, ideas about change must engage people of various backgrounds who do not agree about everything. Second, people must find themselves in places that are not their homes, and among groups who were not previously their friends. Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If tyrants feel no consequences for their actions in the three-dimensional world, nothing will change.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“I suppose the idea behind the “Some of my best friends are black” defense is that you cannot be prejudiced if you choose to interact with different racial backgrounds. It suggests that any association with black people is a form of activism when it in fact is the bare minimum of living in a society that includes black people.”
― Ziwe Fumudoh, Black Friend: Essays