Elizabeth

“It's work to be the only person of color in an organization, bearing the weight of all your white co-workers questions about Blackness. It's work to always be hypervisible because of your skim - easily identified as being present or absent - but for your needs to be completely invisible to those around you. It's work to do the emotional labor or pointing out problematic racist thinking, policies, actions, and statements while desperately trying to avoid bitterness and cynicism.”
― Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

“I don't know what to do with what I've learned," she said. "I can't fix your pain, and I can't take it away, but I can see it. And I can work for the rest of my life to make sure your children don't have to experience the pain of racism."

And then she said nine words that I've never forgotten: "Doing nothing is no longer an option for me.”
― Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

“It’s work to be the only person of color in an organization, bearing the weight of all your white co-workers’ questions about Blackness.”
― Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

“On the surface, ojalá translates to “hopefully” in English. But that’s just on paper, merely the dictionary definition. The reality is that there are some words that defy translation; their meaning contains a whole host of things simmering beneath the surface. There’s beauty contained in the word, more than the flippancy of an idle hope. It speaks to the tenor of life, the low points and the high, the sheer unpredictability of it all. And at the heart of it, the word takes everything and puts it into the hands of a higher power, acknowledging the limits of those here on earth, and the hope, the sheer hope, the kind you hitch your life to, that your deepest wish, your deepest yearning will eventually be yours.”
― Chanel Cleeton, Next Year in Havana