“Making space for another viewpoint does not negate yours. Quite the opposite — it provides more context and framework for your own experience.” (Kiara Goodwin, The Everygirl)

Meg Guliford on being a black grad student right now: “I’m disappointed with and disheartened by the institutional expectation that pressing forward with little interruption while trying to process all this heartbreak is healthy.”

“The ability to disconnect from your identity to engage with an oppressor is a privilege. The ability to disconnect from your emotions and values to engage with someone else’s hate is a privilege.”

“Just having a mix of people (diversity) doesn’t mean anything fundamentally changes. And tolerance is terrible; I tolerate my annual mammogram but I certainly don’t like or look forward to it.”

“It felt so odd to be so enclosed within a word, like I occupied a space—a space as small as their tongue. A coin perhaps, my value etched on the surface: gender: female, race: Asian, worth: half a regular person.”

One day he went to an orthodontist, paid in advance, and sent a note home to her parents suggesting they get her braces, all expenses paid. One day she showed up on the bus and beamed her sparkly new braces at him, and handed him a pie that her mother had made.

This is just how white supremacy works. Without vigilance, it seeps into everything: like an overlooked red sock that stains the whole laundry load pink. That one red sock that makes my whites look as if, pre-wash, I had soaked ’em all in blood.

“Responsibility does not just lie with the writer, because literature is, at its very heart, a collaborative effort. The reader is complicit in the creation of the story, bringing their own prejudices and ways of seeing the world.”

“Hopelessness is necessary for the hard work of resisting tyranny and fascism. It is the precondition for sustained social movements because history isn’t a straight line. It is a spinning top that eventually moves forward but also always goes round and round as it does.”

America is lucky black people are really only fighting to be treated equally. Considering a black person is shot by police at an average of every 28 hours, we could be asking for more.
 
We could be asking for what it owes.

“While ‘race relations’ may be working in Halifax for middle aged white people, for many of us large scale improvement is not so obvious… this is a city where three black men were gunned down last week. Fuck your race relations, let’s talk about white supremacy.”

“It is my belief that Beyoncé is, quite frankly, sick and tired of misinterpretation and ignorance all together.” — The Gettysburg Compiler deconstructs Beyonce’s “Formation.”

“I don’t need Beyonce to be the blackest artist on the planet, or to get her blackness right for my benefit.”

But once she said it, I understood why so many folks — ones not of color — loved [Chiraq] so much. It absolves them of responsibility, placing the bulk of the blame squarely on the shoulders of those suffering the most.

Girls who read, learned, climbed trees, fought back, solved mysteries, fell down, got back up, struggled, persevered. Girls who survived crazy hardships or learned valuable lessons. Girls who looked just like me. Brave girls. Smart girls. Funny girls. White girls.