African Americans

"We can't just talk about liturgical matters or translations of particular books of the Bible, as important as they are. We have to deal with the fact that people are suffering."

"I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn't simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn't they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it. In overly mythologizing our ancestors, we forget an all-too-important reality: the vast majority were ordinary people, which is to say they were people just like everyone else. This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legitimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence."

"To this day, the only Americans who have ever received government restitution for slavery were white enslavers in Washington, D.C., whom the federal government compensated after the Civil War for their loss of human property."

"responses to this are absolutely hilarious. ppl acting like backing trump is some niche or isolated thing and not quite literally the majority opinion among white ppl"

"I went to Galveston, Texas, in part, because I wanted to spend time with people who were the actual descendants of those who had been freed by General Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3. And it was a really remarkable moment, because I was in this place, on this island, on this land, with people for whom Juneteenth was not an abstraction. It was not a performance. It was not merely a symbol. It was part of their tradition. It was part of their lineage. It was an heirloom that had been passed down, that had made their lives possible. And so, I think I gained a more intimate sense of what that holiday meant."

"And so, part of what is happening in these state legislatures across the country with regard to the effort to push back against teaching of history — 1619 Project, critical race theory and the like — is a recognition that we have developed in this country a more sophisticated understanding, a more sophisticated framework, a more sophisticated public lexicon, with which to understand how slavery — how racism was not just an interpersonal phenomenon, it was a historic one, it was a structural one, it was a systemic one. And I’m very much sympathetic — I know there’s some sentiment out there, that people are saying, “Well, we didn’t ask for Juneteenth to become a holiday. We want voting rights. We want police reform. We want abolition. We want” — and I 100% understand that. I also think that we should not undervalue what it means for Juneteenth to become a holiday, in part because then we are not valuing the work that Black activists have done over the course of decades to get there, and because while symbols are not necessarily material change, they are not irrelevant."

"People on the right have been very afraid of a narrative that doesn't deify our founding, that actually forces us to confront it, because that leads to change. When people know better oftentimes they do better. We are seeing that now."

"Saying "I worked very hard for it" to justify your position as a billionaire is one of the most absurd things I can imagine when there are people working multiple jobs who still don't make enough to feed their children and pay their rent."

"When I think of emancipation, I think of all of the people who fought for freedom but who never got a chance to experience it. The end of slavery did not happen overnight, it came from intergenerational work by those who fought for a better world they knew they might never see"

"Just so we're clear, there is no way to have an honest conversation about immigration from Central America without talking both about the impact of climate change and about a history of US intervention that politically and economically destabilized many of these countries."

"Rewatching the Freedom Riders documentary, seeing the face of a young John Lewis, and I'm reminded of how so many of the ppl who spit on, cursed at, & assaulted these riders are ppl who are still alive today. Still alive, still voting, still here. None of this was that long ago."

"I've said this before, but if you're doing an MLK day service project consider bringing King-level analysis to it. Don't just serve lunch at a soup kitchen, interrogate why millions of ppl live in poverty in the first place. King's legacy isn't about charity, it's about justice."

"I simply cannot imagine having access to that much wealth (a billion dollars is one thousand stacks of a million dollars!) and thinking that using a minuscule percentage of that money to make sure other people have access to food, homes, and education was a bad thing."

"The Voting Rights Act was only signed 55 years ago. Tonight I'm thinking about all the Black folks in Georgia who have lived on both sides of it. Who voted in this election and who remember a time when they wouldn't have been able to. It wasn't that long ago. Not at all."

"Worth repeating that all of the police violence you see happening right now has been happening for a long time before there were any camera phones to record it. It's a daily phenomenon in communities across the country. It's structurally embedded into how these forces operate."

"Spent this week in Senegal & have been thinking about how activists there are pushing to have the street signs named after French colonists removed in ways paralleling the fight to take down Confederate statues. It was a reminder how global the fight against white supremacy is."

"Can we find ways to be more open, more receptive and more welcoming to people who don't fit into standard categories? That's the essence of the debate. Some say: You can't adjust the practice without influencing the doctrine. Others say that you can maintain the doctrine and adjust the practice. I would be in the latter category. It's a matter of theological debate."

"the officer was not involved in a shooting. the police shot someone"

"I've said this before, but for all the people who believe you definitely would have been abolitionists in the era of slavery, who you are today is who you would have been then. You don't need to imagine scenarios of living in the 19th century, there's work to do here and now."

"I'll keep saying it, keeping millions of ppl in poverty is a choice this country makes every day. There is enough money for ppl not to be evicted from their homes, there is enough for ppl not to go hungry, there is enough for ppl to avoid jail bc of a parking ticket. It's absurd."

"We cannot make up for all the lives lost and dreams snatched, for all the suffering endured. But we can atone for it. We can acknowledge the crime. And we can do something to try to set things right, to ease the hardship and hurt of so many of our fellow Americans."

"When I read Jefferson's disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is. When Robert Hayden gave us the ballads to remember how captured Africans survived the Middle Passage and arrived on these shores, it was an act of love. When Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the children on the South Side of Chicago playing with one another in neighborhoods left neglected by the city, it was an act of love. When Audre Lorde fractured this language and then built us a new one, giving us a fresh way to make sense of who we are in the world, it was an act of love. When Sonia Sanchez makes lightning of her tongue, moving from Southern colloquialisms to stanzas shaped by Swahili, traversing an ocean in one breath, it is an act of love. Jefferson's conceptions of love seem to have been so distorted by his own prejudices that he was unable to recognize the endless examples of love that pervaded plantations across the country: mothers who huddled over their children and took the lash so their little ones wouldn't have to; surrogate mothers, fathers, and grandparents who took in children and raised them as their own when their biological parents were disappeared in the middle of the night; the people who loved and married and committed to one another despite the omnipresent threat that they might be separated at any moment. What is love if not this?"

"never Trump Rs (handshake emoji) moderate Ds -> this is an aberration"

"While a life like Frederick Douglass's is remarkable, we must remember that not every person who lived through slavery was like Douglass. Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave breakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape. No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglass. There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways, but our country's teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives at the expense of the millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told."

"None of us can be held responsible for the wrongs of our ancestors. But if today we choose not to do the right and necessary thing, that burden we own."

"School curricula generally treat slavery as an aberration in a free society, and textbooks largely ignore the way that many prominent men, women, industries, and institutions profited from and protected slavery."

"More praise for the movie's headliner isn't hard to come by. Her voice is a weapon."

"Oh, I'm working with a singer who acts. I felt like I was working with a woman who truly knew how to tell a story, whether she was speaking or singing or just standing there feeling something."

"We will continue to support Jennifer in maintaining her healthy lifestyle and wish her the very best in her personal and professional life."

"Chicago is home. Obviously, family, and it's all I know. I don't care where I go in the world, there is no place like home. Every time I come home, I get to come home to Chicago."

"Well, I don’t really have time to do much [exercise], I just watch what I eat. I’m very careful and cautious of what I’m eating and I just try to place those meals throughout the day."

"I went from being an aunt, having a mom, and being a child to not having a mom, becoming a mom, and raising my own child."

"Stuff like this happens in your own home! I defy all the odds being African-American, living in a wealthy neighborhood and being a working mom. It’s too many foreign things in one person! It’s so ignorant. Race is just one of them. I face them all."

"When you pre­record you're married to that emotion, that delivery. I like the rawness, the honesty of being in the moment."

"I am at the weight I want to be, People are under the impression that I’m still losing but I’m not."

"Everything happens for a reason, and everything is going to turn out the way it should."

"...having to experience so much so soon, and then to have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, that's a lot. I can understand that."

"It's like a brand new me, Sometimes I don't even recognize myself."

"Often, kids don’t appreciate the choices available, as if it’s either the street or nothing."

"We need to stop separating ourselves by how dark or how light we are."

"A great example of colorism is to believe I can be compared to anyone,"

"It's all about self-motivation because at the end of the day, you can have all the trainers and all the money in the world, but if you don't have that mindset, it's not possible."

"Follow your heart’s truth with no need for personal gain other than the feeling produced when doing what you truly love."

"God is so good. Always follow your dreams, own your purpose! Embrace God’s anointing."

"Anytime you see Beyonce, Jay Z, Kanye West. Anytime a young black person's doing good, that's motivation for everybody else. Anytime, anytime, it's motivation. Use that fuel to push you forward. That's what I did"

"I'm a mother and I have a life that's in my care and someone that looks up to me. That helps me see myself in a whole other light in a different way. It's a whole new world."

"I always like to say what men can't conquer, they like to destroy, I've learned, and that's something else that Mama Franklin taught me."

"You decide what beautiful means to you. We don’t all need to look the same. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, you decide what’s beautiful in the world. Not the other way around."

"It's unfortunate that the "hustle hard" thing can be toxic, too, to our lives. It's OK to grind, but don't grind your wheels off, pooh. Work hard, but work smart. Be able to leave a space for you to still enjoy it to where you're not looking at the end and resenting something you care about."

"You can do anything as long as you don't stop believing. When it is meant to be, it will be. You just have to follow your heart."