Sean Henry

“Such was the short bitter life of Brother Tod Clifton. Now he’s in this box with the bolts tightened down. He’s in the box and we’re in there with him, and when I’ve told you this you can go. It’s dark in this box and it’s crowded. It has a cracked ceiling and a clogged-up toilet in the hall. It has rats and roaches, and it’s far, far too expensive a dwelling. The air is bad and it’ll be cold this winter. Tod Clifton is crowded and he needs the room. Tell them to get out of the box,’ that’s what he would say if you could hear him. Tell them to get out of the box and go teach the cops to forget that rhyme. Tell them to teach them that when they call you nigger to make a rhyme with trigger it makes the gun backfire.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“A ‘job creator’ is someone who figures out how to threaten you with starvation unless you do something you don’t want to do.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“Saying that one does not care about race is offered as an exculpatory virtue, when in fact it can be a form of cruelty. It is precisely because we, as a nation, have not cared much about African Americans that we have allowed our criminal justice system to create a new racial undercaste.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“The colorblindness ideal is premised on the notion that we, as a society, can never be trusted to see race and treat each other fairly or with genuine compassion. A commitment to color consciousness, by contrast, places faith in our capacity as humans to show care and concern for others, even as we are fully cognizant of race and possible racial differences.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness