Sherri

“I learned that although we knew about white people even if we didn’t live with them—they were co-workers, school administrators, and of course, every image onscreen—segregation meant that white people didn’t know much about us at all. For all the ways that segregation is aimed at limiting the choices of people of color, it’s white people who are ultimately isolated.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“There is no such thing as devils. They are the people of lost histories. We see them only in translation.”
― Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors

“No governments in modern history save Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany have segregated as well as the United States has, with precision and under the color of law. (And even then, both the Third Reich and the Afrikaner government looked to America’s laws to create their systems.) U.S. government financing required home developers and landlords to put racially restrictive covenants (agreements to sell only to white people) in their housing contracts. And as we’ve already seen, the federal government supported housing segregation through redlining and other banking practices, the result of which was that the two investments that created the housing market that has been a cornerstone of building wealth in American families, the thirty-year mortgage and the federal government’s willingness to guarantee banks’ issuance of those loans, were made on a whites-only basis and under conditions of segregation.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“I’m fundamentally a hopeful person, because I know that decisions made the world as it is and that better decisions can change it. Nothing about our situation is inevitable or immutable, but you can’t solve a problem with the consciousness that created it.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together