Walt Lee

“What we forget, if we ever knew, is that what we know now about status and wealth creation and sacrifice are predicated on who we are — that is, not poor.

If you change the conditions of your not-poor status, you change everything you know as a result of being a not-poor. You have no idea what you would do if you were poor until you are poor. And not intermittently poor or formerly not-poor, but born poor, expected to be poor, and treated by bureaucracies, gatekeepers, and well-meaning respectability authorities as inherently poor. Then, and only then, will you understand the relative value of a ridiculous status symbol to someone who intuits that they cannot afford to not have it.”
― Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays

“I fix myself, even when it causes great pain to do so, because I know that I cannot fix the way the world sees me.”
― Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays

“I'm convinced that the deck is so stacked that only a certain number can get through. I happened to be one of that certain number. That's all.”
― Stokely Carmichael, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael

“The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself. And this means how to move to that voice from within himself, rather than to those raucous, persuasive, or threatening voices from outside, pressuring him to be what the world wants him to be.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches