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Quotes About Injustice

Bran felt terribly sorry for his sisters, but it was hardly his fault that the world was so determined to make girls suffer a great deal more than boys. He hadn't built the world. It had nothing to do with him.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
She thought of all the Black soldiers who came back from the war and found the same dangerous, inhospitable place they'd left, changed but unchanged for them.
~ Cathleen Schine
The land of opportunity seized and given to someone else.
~ Cathleen Schine
That is what our Fuhrer maintains- that some are more worthy of life than others. Indeed, he asserts that an elite few in the world are worthy of life and procreation. Ask yourself, if you do not believe that to be true why is it not? If this child is not able to contribute to society in the same way you and I are able, does it make her less valuable? How do you know?
~ Cathy Gohlke
Deplorable situations were becoming commonplace in America these days4, jolting many people from their comfort zones. The rich were getting richer, the poor were getting poorer, and formerly middle class citizens were plummeting toward third world poverty level. Justice was bought and sold while government corruption reigned supreme. Crime escalated out of control while the CIA's booming cocaine, crack, and heroin industries 5 turned our street corners into a blood bath.
~ Cathy O'Brien
Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst
~ Cathy Park Hong
Like the rich boarding school kid who gets away with a hit-and-run, getting away with it doesn't mean that you're lawless but that you are above the law. The bad-boy artist can do whatever he wants because of who he is. Transgressive bad-boy art is, in fact, the most risk-averse, an endless loop of warmed-over stunts for an audience of one: the banker collector.
~ Cathy Park Hong
2017 study found that the ideology of America as a fair meritocracy led to more self-doubt and behavioral problems among low-income black and brown sixth graders because, as one teacher said, "they blame themselves for problems they can't control.
~ Cathy Park Hong
In our efforts to belong in America, we act grateful, as if we've been given a second chance at life. But our shared root is not the opportunity this nation has given us but how the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy has enriched itself off the blood of our countries. We cannot forget this.
~ Cathy Park Hong
Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it's racial, and being told, Oh that's all in your head.
~ Cathy Park Hong
When Kochiyama found a waitressing job in New York, her black coworkers were the first to educate her about America's racist history. Finally, Kochiyama had a vocabulary, a historical context. What had happened to her wasn't a nightmarish aberration but the norm.
~ Cathy Park Hong
But our shared root is not the opportunity this nation has given us but how the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy has enriched itself off the blood of our countries. We cannot forget this.
~ Cathy Park Hong
But where does the silence that neglects her end, and where does the silence that respects her begin?
~ Cathy Park Hong
Dao was not everyman, because not every man would have been brutalized in that way. In the same way I saw Dao and thought, He is not any man, he is my father, Chicago aviation officers thought, He is not any man, he is a thing. They sized him up as passive, unmasculine, untrustworthy, suspicious, and foreign. Years of accumulated stereotypes unconsciously flickered through their minds
~ Cathy Park Hong
If the work of art circulates, it circulates for profit, which has been grossly reaped by white authorship. Speaking on this subject, Amiri Baraka offers an invaluable quote: "All cultures learn from each other. The problem is that if the Beatles tell me that they learned everything they know from Blind Willie, I want to know why Blind Willie is still running an elevator in Jackson, Mississippi.
~ Cathy Park Hong
Three Chinese laborers died for every two miles of track built to make Manifest Destiny a reality, but when the celebratory photo of the Golden Spike was taken, not a single Chinese man was welcome to pose with the other—white—railway workers.
~ Cathy Park Hong
where Chinese immigrants couldn't even leave their homes without being spat at, clubbed, or shot in the back, a campaign culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration law that banned a race from entering the United States, after legislators and media characterized the Chinese as "rats," "lepers," but also "machine-like" workers who stole jobs from good white Americans.
~ Cathy Park Hong
I cannot count the number of times I have seen my parents condescended to or mocked by white adults. This was so customary that when my mother had any encounter with a white adult, I was always hypervigilant, ready to mediate or pull her away. To grow up Asian in America is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they cannot protect you.
~ Cathy Park Hong
In Pryor, I saw someone channel what I call minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one's perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.
~ Cathy Park Hong
A now-classic book that explores minor feelings is Claudia Rankine's Citizen. After hearing a racist remark, the speaker asks herself, What did you say? She saw what she saw, she heard what she heard, but after her reality has been belittled so many times, she begins to doubt her very own senses.
~ Cathy Park Hong
In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we're being used by whites to keep the black man down.
~ Cathy Park Hong
Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy.
~ Cathy Park Hong
My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don't talk to me about gratitude.
~ Cathy Park Hong
Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.
~ Cathy Park Hong