“No, it is not true that the Revolution has gone to the lengths to which colonialism has gone.
But we do not on this account justify the immediate reactions of our compatriots. We understand them, but we can neither excuse them nor reject them.
Because we want a democratic and a renovated Algeria, because we believe one cannot rise and liberate oneself in one area and sink in another, we condemn, with pain in our hearts, those brothers who have flung themselves into revolutionary action with the almost physiological brutality that centuries of oppression give rise to and feed.”
- Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism
“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own. For instance, 'I can't possibly teach Black women's writing - their experience is so different from mine." Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, 'She's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?' Or, 'She's a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?' Or again, 'This woman writes of her sons and I have no children. And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.”
- Audre Lorde, When I dare to be powerful
“I am no longer wired to catalogue and sift through only my own internal horrors, and so, by the mercy of simply looking up and looking around, I can see that there are people willing to love me, and that I am willing to love them, and, yes, I cannot believe that this is the world we’ve got, but I am chasing the tail of the world’s end, imagining that if I catch it (by way of tidying up my own spirit, my own heart, and also my own material communities), there might be something better than the present.”
- Hanif Abdurraqib, In Defense of Despair
“For this dubious effort, and still more dubious achievement, they congratulate themselves and expect to be congratulated -: in the coin, furthermore, of black gratitude, gratitude not only that my burden is - (slowly, but it takes time) being made lighter but my joy that white people are improving.
My black burden has not, however, been made lighter in the sixty years since my birth or the nearly forty years since the first essay in this collection was published and my joy, therefore, as concerns the immense strides made by white people is, to say the least, restrained.
Leaving aside my friends, the people I love, who can-not, usefully, be described as either black or white, they are, like life itself, thank God, many many colors, I do not feel, alas, that my country has any reason for self-congratulation.”
- James Baldwin, Dark Days
"This is the shadow of hope. Knowing that we may never see the realization of our dreams, and yet still showing up."
- Austin Channing Brown
I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
“The educational system of this country is, in short, designed to destroy the black child. It does not matter whether it destroys him by stoning him in the ghetto or by driving him mad in the isolation of Harvard. And whoever has survived this crucible is a witness to the power of the Republic's educational system.”
- James Baldwin, Dark Days