Abhimat

“As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or you can go the other way. You protect yourself by opening up. You don’t ask to be accepted for everything you are, just the one part of yourself that you’re willing to share.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“Sometimes, when you don’t see yourself in the world, you start to think that you don’t exist.”
― DeRay Mckesson, On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope

“I am constantly reminding myself that the goal of protest is progress, not simply more protest. Protest, though not the solution, is a precursor to the solution. It creates space that would otherwise not exist, and forces conversations and topics that have been long ignored into the public sphere. It illuminates what our country would rather forget. Protest remains necessary in a country with such ingrained systemic inequity and in which the traditional mechanisms of power have not often benefited marginalized communities without direct pressure.”
― DeRay Mckesson, On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope

“I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don’t have that Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that’s really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren’t counting the black people they slaughtered. How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal? So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood