"The journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings."
"I write - and read - to assure myself that other people have felt what I'm feeling too, that it isn't just me, that this is real, and valid, and true."
"Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can't afford to stay silent. This book is an attempt to speak."
"What history had I inherited that left me alien in my place of birth?"
"We tell ourselves that racism is about moral values, when instead it is about the survival strategy of systemic power."
"White children are taught not to 'see' race, whereas children of colour are taught - often with no explanation - that we must work twice as hard as our white counterparts if we wish to succeed."
"In order to dismantle unjust, racist structures, we must see race. We must see who benefits from their race, who is disproportionately impacted by negative stereotypes about their race, and to who power and privilege is bestowed upon - earned or not - because of their race, their class, and their gender. Seeing race is essential to changing the system."
"There is an unattributed definition of racism that defines it as prejudice plus power. Those disadvantaged by racism can certainly be cruel, vindictive and prejudiced. Everyone has the capacity to be nasty to other people, to judge them before they get to know them. But there simply aren't enough black people in positions of power to enact racism against white people on the kind of grand scale it currently operates against black people."
"'I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice...'"
"She is a white immigrant in Britain, which makes her both an outsider and insider: an outsider because her country has its own culture, and its own well-documented racism, and an insider because her white American-ness will have her positioned as an 'expat' rather than an 'immigrant'."
"At the core of the fear is the belief that anything that doesn't represent white homogeneity exists only to erase it. That multiculturalism is the start of a slippery slope towards the destruction of Western civilization."
"As an adult Harry Potter fan, I'd begun to think of Hermione Granger, with her house-elf liberation campaign, as a well-meaning but guilty-feeling white liberal, taking on a social justice cause with gusto without ever really consulting the views and feelings of the people she was fighting for."
"It was what gave me a framework to begin understanding the world. My feminist thinking gave rise to my anti-racist thinking, serving as a tool that helped me forge a sense of self-worth."
"Feminism, at its best, is a movement that works to liberate all people who have been economically, socially and culturally marginalised by an ideological system that has been designed for them to fail. That means disabled people, black people, trans people, women and non-binary people, LGB people and working-class people... Feminism will have won when we have ended poverty. It will have won when women are no longer expected to work two jobs (the care and emotional labour for their families as well as their day jobs) by default."
"There is a difference between saying 'we want to be included' and saying 'we want to reconstruct your exclusive system'. The former is more readily accepted into the mainstream."
"Often, there will be no one fighting your corner but yourself. It was black feminist poet Audre Lorde who said: 'your silence will not protect you.' Who wins when we don't speak? Not us."
"If you are disgusted by what you see, and if you feel the fire coursing through your veins, then it's up to you... It doesn't matter what it is, as long as you're doing something."
