{"quotes":[{"text":"If you kill a black man, the world is silent. You can hear a garage door opening from twenty blocks away. You can pick up a pay phone and only hear the dial tone. Shooting stars sound exactly like the soft laughter of a little girl in Gasworks Park. If you kill a white man, the world erupts with noise: fireworks, sirens, a gavel pounding a desk, the slamming of doors.","author":"Sherman Alexie","tags":["black-lives-matter","racism"],"id":5695,"author_id":"Sherman+Alexie"},{"text":"The conundrum of the twenty-first (century) is that with the best intentions of color blindness, and laws passed in this spirit, we still carry instincts and reactions inherited from our environments and embedded in our being below the level of conscious decision. There is a color line in our heads, and while we could see its effects we couldn’t name it until now. But john powell is also steeped in a new science of “implicit bias,” which gives us a way, finally, even to address this head on. It reveals a challenge that is human in nature, though it can be supported and hastened by policies to create new experiences, which over time create new instincts and lay chemical and physical pathways. This is a helpfully unromantic way to think about what we mean when we aspire, longingly, to a lasting change of heart. And john powell and others are bringing training methodologies based on the new science to city governments and police forces and schools. What we’re finding now in the last 30 years is that much of the work, in terms of our cognitive and emotional response to the world, happens at the unconscious level.","author":"Krista Tippett","tags":["art-of-living","black-lives-matter","color-line","diversity","history","humanity","implicit-bias","inclusion","john-powell","love","nature","non-violence","on-being","race","racism"],"id":12513,"author_id":"Krista+Tippett"},{"text":"If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery--skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.","author":"Saidiya V. Hartman","tags":["american-history","black-lives-matter","slavery"],"id":26919,"author_id":"Saidiya+V.+Hartman"},{"text":"Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world.","author":"Ta-Nehisi Coates","tags":["black-lives-matter","criminals","direction","juvenile-delinquency","juvenile-justice-system","opportunity","poverty","single-parenting"],"id":38867,"author_id":"Ta-Nehisi+Coates"},{"text":"It is shameful, I feel, that we even have to make this point. That it is necessary to say, even once, that Black lives matter is itself a testimony to the racism of our society. It ought to be obvious that Black lives matter, that Black people matter, and by implication, that their murder, especially at the hands of the state, cannot go unanswered. And yet it is not obvious. It the context of the legal system, the recent evidence suggests that it is not even true. The slogan represents, then, not simply a fact, but more importantly a challenge. If we believe it, we must make it real.","author":"Kristian Williams","tags":["black-lives-matter","racism"],"id":69145,"author_id":"Kristian+Williams"},{"text":"They took one look at me,And hated my black face.They took one look at me,And decided on my fate.They took one look at me,And forced an unknown fear.They took one look at me,And caused the shed of tears.They took one look at me,And decided I was wrong.They took one look at me,And now I'm singing the slave mans song...","author":"N'Zuri Za Austin","tags":["acknowledge","all-lives-matter","black-lives-matter","bleed","bleeding","blood","conflict","erase","faith","harmony","hope","human","humanity","humanness","injustice","inspiration","invalidate","justice","peace","phrase","poem","pray-for-everyone","pray-for-the-world","quote","rain","raining","silence","silenced","stronger-together","today","together","togetherness","union","unity","voice","words","write"],"id":73171,"author_id":"N%27Zuri+Za+Austin"},{"text":"The law is not an ass but a chameleon in ass skin: it turns deathly black when around blacks and pristine white when around whites.","author":"Agona Apell","tags":["black-lives-matter","blue-lives-matter","justice-system","law","laws","lawyers"],"id":85816,"author_id":"Agona+Apell"},{"text":"The price of conviction has never been cheap, but it will always be worth it.","author":"Andrena Sawyer","tags":["activism","black-lives-matter","civil-rights","colin-kaepernick","donald-trump","justice","nfl","racism"],"id":112331,"author_id":"Andrena+Sawyer"},{"text":"The problem is, there is no geographical cure. No matter where we (Black American Folk) go, we are still too plugged into this place. Our cousins, grandmothers, aunts, nieces will be in this place. And the second we start looking at it as a 'them' problem, we become another problem.","author":"Darnell Lamont Walker","tags":["american","black-lives-matter","black-people","racism","racism-in-america"],"id":116184,"author_id":"Darnell+Lamont+Walker"},{"text":"I like how writing can take you off for a jaunt in your head and then set you back down in the chair where you've been all along.","author":"Georgann Low","tags":["black-lives-matter","french-language","gardening","how-to-meditate","lover","meditation","memoir","spiritual-growth"],"id":121191,"author_id":"Georgann+Low"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":37,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}