Rebecca 1. On grief, shock, and not trusting white institutions “I don't think shocked is the word that I would use. At the risk of making a sweeping generalization, I think we don't trust white people. I don't think we ever have. And I think even when we see something that looks like forward progress, that doesn't necessarily mean that we trust the white privileged supremacist institutions that were the reason why we needed forward progress in the first place. So I don't know that surprised is or shocked is a word. I think I have some grief about the fact that my generation is now facing something that we thought was long over.” 2. On how quickly government moves when Black rights are targeted “If you ask for anything else, the answer is the wheels of government move slowly and the wheels of justice move slowly… But the second you want to strip Black people of something, the second you want to oppress Black people… ‘We can do that over lunch. We can get that done in the next hour. We can undo 50 years worth of voting rights legislation in five minutes.’” 3. On whiteness as an invented category and an exchange “Isn't that the setup of whiteness all along? And when I say whiteness in that, I'm talking about the category white because the truth is nobody who identifies as white is actually like whiteness is a contrived category. What you are is European. What you are is Irish or German or British or Dutch or any other set of categories. And the whole idea in the U.S. sort of experiment is that you would exchange that ethnic specificity, that nationality and the story, the narrative and the identity that is attached to that, that you would exchange it. You would erase yourself. You would shorten your name, change your last name, drop your language, drop the accent, drop all of the cultural markers of your people to join this category called white in the United States.” 4. On the cost of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia “The exchange is always, you get to become us and them is whoever we're othering at the moment. And this belief that in that othering somehow you come out unscathed, uninjured, which is never true, right? Racism, misogyny, xenophobia, it's expensive. It costs money.” 5. On Supreme Court cases and the invention of whiteness “If you follow the court cases at the turn of the century where you have a number of immigrants that are coming to the United States under all these waves and there's a series of court cases, people seeking citizenship… the debate in the courts the entire time is this idea that there's such a thing as a category called white and the people who belong to this category have access to power and wealth and the people who are not in this category will not have access to that power or wealth.” 6. On racism reinventing itself “Racism is smart. Misogyny is smart. Xenophobia is smart. It never stays the same. It morphs and it changes. It reimagines and reinvents itself. It's clever… When you have this period of expansion of rights, it will be followed by a period of extreme backlash.” 7. On the danger of believing civil rights are permanent “I was born into a season where the battles had already been fought and won and the space around human rights was fairly expansive. So my only experience is living in the space of having the rights, the civil rights that we should have as human beings. That's what I know, and it never dawned on me… that in a country that could put the first Black man in office could at the drop of a dime pivot and do the polar opposite.” 8. On power, race, and who gets to belong “In the end it's probably really about power and that racial lines, gender lines, nationality lines are how we have decided to limit the access to that power. And this is the thing: when you get invited into the us category and you think you're secure, you aren't. Because to quote Martin Luther King Jr., injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Just because today you fall in the category of us in the us versus them calculation is no guarantee that tomorrow you will stay in that category.” 9. On loyalty to power “If my connection is only to power, I'm loyal to no one and at the same time I'm loyal to anyone who allows me to keep that power.” 10. On the present threat and the limits of talking about trauma as past “Probably the way that we were imagining trauma in that cohort was on this idea that the trauma that we're talking about has long since passed and whatever that threat was doesn't exist today in that way. And for that reason, we sort of have the space to talk about the trauma itself and its impact. And I think where we are in this moment is that's no longer true. The threat is present, it is real, it is tangible, and it's bigger and more concrete in significant ways than it was five, six years ago.” 11. On fear, denial, and wanting to put her head in the sand “There are parts of me that still want to put my head in the sand and I've been there since the election and that's legit. There are real ways in which I intentionally do not know the most current set of events because I choose not to know them because I don't want to process that and I don't want to live with the fear of what that actually means.” 12. On how far back the country might go “What happened, what we did in immigration law during World War II, what we did around Japanese internment, all these things… they could literally come for people. You start talking about you're no longer a citizen, everything and anything you own can be seized by the federal government… how far back are we going to go before we can stop the slide?” 13. On keeping it academic in order to breathe “I don't know. I have to keep this academic. Otherwise, you can't breathe through it.” 14. On building again after rights are dismantled “Representative Jim Clyburn came on the line and his comment was, ‘I'm ready to build again.’ The structure that we built for the voting rights and civil rights legislation of the ’60s, it no longer exists in this country. That legal infrastructure… the last piece of it was dismantled by the court in this case. And so he's like, ‘It's just time to build.’” 15. On the emotional labor of rebuilding “What struck me is like, where does he find the capacity to even begin to imagine building again, let alone doing the work of building? You were around to build the first set and it didn’t even last your lifetime. And he's like, ‘Literally, I'm ready to get in a room with the lawyers and the organizers and the people and let's build something else.’ And it stopped me. It shocked me.” 16. On representation and opportunity “Representation absolutely matters, but I mean in the ways in which it matters in terms of what it opens up and what opportunities might be there versus what is not going to be there for the next generation… That means the person that's hiring for the job or the person that's granting internships or the person that is doing the home loan, all those things, who's in place and what's their mindset and their perspective.” 17. On stress, uncertainty, and the future “A future that is far less certain than it was a week ago or a year ago.” 18. On care and family “Spend some time with my kid who's home from school, that's a good thing. I'm going to go to dinner tonight with my family, eat some good food, spend some time with my favorite humans.” Danielle 1. On shock, Trump, and anti-Blackness “I've been thinking about how there's one narrative like Trump hates immigrants and there's the actual truth of I think Trump has a deep hate for African Americans and Black people and he's not hiding that and they're going after that. I guess I was not surprised, but I allowed myself to feel shocked about it this week, to feel shocked that there's so many people that quote or seem good that have gone along with this and amplified it.” 2. On the poll tax and who it harmed “I was thinking it's pre-human trafficking in the United States, pre-colonization, the English did it to their own people. So this was an English thing where I think it was like in the 14th century, they were in that Hundred Years’ War and they needed to raise money for the war. So what did they do? They put a poll tax, like a flat rate across poor and wealthy alike. And of course, when you put a flat rate, it led to a revolt by peasants because they couldn't literally afford it.” 3. On the poll tax in the United States “With the coming of slavery and then Jim Crow and then sharecropping and all of the things that kind of follow in there… you can see how this poll tax here in the United States and the history of Jim Crow, it didn't just hurt Black folks. It took out poor folks, immigrants, like all these folks. For sure. So the idea that these white folks are doing something quote for white people, it's amazing what white folks will trade in just to separate themselves out, just to hurt Black folks.” 4. On proximity to whiteness and power “Connection for white folks to white folks or connection to power or whiteness, let's say connection to whiteness, that will always trump any human rights, any love for neighbor, any connection to legitimate faith. I believe that inherent in the bodily manifestation of this over centuries, that connection to power trumps almost everything else.” Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.
