{"quotes":[{"text":"What does it mean when I say that 'I don't see race?' It means that because I learned to see no difference between 'white' and 'color,' I have white-washed my own sense of self. It means that I know more about what it is to be a white person than what it is to be Asian, and I am a stranger among both.","author":"Michi Trota","tags":["asian","colorblind-racism","identity","race","race-relations","whiteness"],"id":40092,"author_id":"Michi+Trota"},{"text":"The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.","author":"James Baldwin","tags":["baldwin","blackness","race","stranger-in-the-village","whiteness"],"id":40114,"author_id":"James+Baldwin"},{"text":"Whiteness–the whole constellation of practices, beliefs, attitudes, emotions that are mixed up in being white–is the problem. Whiteness is degraded and depraved[…] To the degree that we accept any of the meaning that the dominant society gives to whiteness, we white people are degraded and depraved.","author":"Robert Jensen","tags":["racism","white-privilege","white-supremacy","whiteness"],"id":119914,"author_id":"Robert+Jensen"},{"text":"Nothing changes if we just feel shitty about being White. And nothing changes if we refuse to talk about it. The opposite of white pride does not have to be white shame. We can’t push it away and pretend it’s not us. We are not color-blind, we are not post-race, we do not get to reject our whiteness because it makes us feel bad…This does not get solved with a Celebration of Diversity Day and a coexist bumper sticker. (Kate Schatz).","author":"Carolina De Robertis","tags":["diversity","race","whiteness"],"id":124857,"author_id":"Carolina+De+Robertis"},{"text":"I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this “condition” affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people.","author":"Danzy Senna","tags":["colonization","race","whiteness"],"id":137786,"author_id":"Danzy+Senna"},{"text":"You cross the field in the snow leaving tracks in perfect whiteness ...Disturbing my placid universe...Marking the landscape within me ...","author":"John Geddes","tags":["disturbing","landscape","peaceful","perfection","placid","poetry","snow","universe","whiteness","world"],"id":162967,"author_id":"John+Geddes"},{"text":"The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.","author":"Ta-Nehisi Coates","tags":["american-history","hr-40","institutionalized-racism","prejudice","racism","reparations","slavery","slavery-in-the-united-states","white-guilt","whiteness"],"id":225797,"author_id":"Ta-Nehisi+Coates"},{"text":"When I ache to live, my mind loves to stay with the peaceful whiteness of a pigeon’s care...In boundless amity..","author":"Munia Khan","tags":["ache","aching","aching-heart","amity","bird","boundless","care","living","living-life","mind","peace","peace-of-mind","peace-on-earth","peaceful","peaceful-life","pigeon","pigeons","spiritual","stay","whiteness"],"id":261570,"author_id":"Munia+Khan"},{"text":"Whiteness has been, above all, a racial formation that presupposed and reproduced relations of inequality and domination between 'whites' and their racial others.","author":"Moon-kie Jung","tags":["race","whiteness"],"id":266901,"author_id":"Moon-kie+Jung"},{"text":"[whiteness] has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury.","author":"Ta-Nehisi Coates","tags":["america","american-history","black-history","blackness","race","racism","racism-in-america","whiteness"],"id":273945,"author_id":"Ta-Nehisi+Coates"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":17,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}