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I am constantly observing my actions, words, and behaviors while processing what my being white has done to affect certain responses and outcomes. The same is true of observing how others interact with me. How does my being white affect what they say and do to me, and how they behave around me? It is an important part of my commitment to actively dismantle the white skin privilege that persists in America today. While I remain much invested in the ongoing work of deconstructing institutional injustice and systemic racism, I am also committed to being hyper-aware of and hyper-sensitive to how I am manifesting and/or receiving privilege. I believe justice requires both. I also believe I can't condition myself to see or to rebel against institutional privilege if I can't first see them in myself.
"People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else. That hundreds of thousands of white people are living, in effect, no better than the "niggers" is not a fact to be regarded with complacency. The social and moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the bitterest, most terrifying kind."
You know, folks, I have to tell you something. This, this white guilt, it's time for all this white guilt to end. I know it won't because I know that most people are scared to death and live lives totally immersed in fear because that's what other people want them to live like, but I'm sick of it. White guilt is doing nothing for anybody, and white guilt is not solving anything. And besides that, a little history lesson for you. If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it's Caucasians. The white race has probably had fewer slaves and for a briefer period of time than any other in the history of the world.
Whether they are able to enact it as lived practice or not, many white folks active in anti-racist struggle today are able to acknowledge that all whites (as well as everyone else within white supremacist culture) have learned to overvalue “whiteness” even as they simultaneously learn to devalue blackness.
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Whites who continue to benefit from racism as institutionalized privilege don’t call themselves white Africans, but call us Black Africans. It’s so astounding the ways in which neoliberalism depoliticizes and erases our histories of resistance. It disowns us from the legacies that we should be protecting and mobilizing with to continue the struggle.
The central question for whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa can be put simply: how to maintain privilege in a situation in which black people have achieved political power. Many stances to the new dispensation are available to white South Africans, but this article concerns only resistant white discourses, referred to as White Talk.
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