Celine

“Integrate well. Move upwards in society. Be praised - until people worry that you're doing too well, and then they remember that you're foreign.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“I decided, enough pain. To the lips of their nocturnal happiness I would attach those of my revenge. I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“Institutional neglect of racism and injustice is the exercise of power, the kind of power that refuses to notice and refuses to speak.”
― Jeff Chang, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“Respectability politics is the dogged belief that if black people just shape up, dress right, and act right, racists would suddenly have a dramatic change of heart, and stop their racist ways. Respectability politics puts all of its faith in racist gatekeepers (telling us that we must change to appeal to their inherent, good-natured humanity), and puts none of its faith in black people living under the weight of poverty and discrimination, scrabbling, trying to make a life any way they can. Poverty is narrow and limiting. People work within the confines of it. That they have to do that is not the problem. Poverty is the problem.”
― Nikesh Shukla