Jenesis’s Reviews > We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation > Status Update

"Ending resegregation is about understanding the ways we allow ourselves to stop seeing the humanity of others. It is about learning again to look, and never stopping."

"What does it mean that we are better able to see pain than love? That rage and conflict in art are perceived as deeply felt, while reconciliation and joy are dismissed as mere sentiment? Does it reveal more about how broken we are than about the art itself?"

"Lives were complicated. The smallest things could trip you up. Those who could least afford it paid the most. Things could escalate in a heartbeat. The biggest mystery was how to turn it down without bowing down. And a life, in all its singularity and strangeness, was always worth the lifting, the telling, and the protecting, and never only for its fragility."

"Culture is necessary to sustain us. It molds us and shapes our relations to each other. An inequitable culture is one in which people do not have the same power to create, access, or circulate their practices, works, ideas, and stories. It is one in which people cannot represent themselves equally. To say that American culture is inequitable is to say that it moves us away from seeing each out in our full humanity."

"Resegregation happens through design and through apathy. It also grows through our blindness--whether willed, imperceivable, or fixed through the best of our intentions--to the deep connections between us all."

"When students protested, it was not anti-free speech, it was the practice of free speech. Critics drew a direct line between protest and censorship, but speaking up about injustice is exactly what democracy is supposed to look like."..."Racial attacks and hate speech, as well as the 'anti-PC' defense of them, are proof that free speech is not a neutral good equally available to all."