14 Quotes by Alice Minium

I, like most millennials, am disillusioned with the net return of academia, but I have not been cheated by education.I have been cheated by a corrupt system, and it is education that has taught me the difference.

We doing these things because we’re moral, enlightened people. We’re doing these things because we are embedded within longstanding structures of institutional power, and education is just one of these functions.And it is a function with tremendous social power to oppress or to legitimize, to open or to close, to create or to calcify, to inscribe or to erase, to pardon or to punish- to dictate, or to free.The one we choose to do, we ought to choose carefully.

Keep writing- this is important. Never stop doing the kind of writing that makes you feel alive. Never sell your creativity for money. Your creativity keeps you alive. It is all you have. If you do choose to lease it, it can be quite lucrative- but do so consciously. Don’t expect your groundbreaking, earth-shattering ideas to gain traction in the court of the Almighty Click that delineates human meaning into a six-point scale of Likes, Loves, Hahas, Wows, Sads, or Angrys.

If I could say education had a product, I would like to say it is abundance.But if education had a product, it would be an empty box.And if successful education had a product, it would be the match ignited which set that box on fire and set the mind upon which every essay on “knowledge” ever written in history was cast into the fire to burn.

In addition, the distortion of actual crime statistics vs. media coverage, shows that news outlets portray black Americans being depicted as suspects or criminals at a rate that exceeds actual arrest statistics for those same crimes by a whopping 24 percentage points- a disparity which reveals a horrific implicit bias in reporting.

This style of reporting parrots and gives greater legitimacy to the frankly disturbing level of vigilance police seem to exercise in their war on poor nonviolent offenders, a vigilance which all too clearly paints a scantly unflattering portrait of the priorities of police, and the prevalence of white supremacist attitudes across all institutional levels.

Popular media uses the depersonalized ‘Unidentified Black Suspect’ as little more than a plot device in its parable of implicit racism- while ignoring the fact that these are people, not plot devices, and that black lives are not ours to own, and the story of black culture is not one white people get to define and rewrite according to what generates clicks and viewership.

It’s one thing to deconstruct and analyze and condemn the institutions of patriarchy and their flaws. It’s another one to feel their bruises on your skin, and their grasping hands pulling your hair and covering your mouth as you scream.

I want to write a thinkpiece about what you did to me. I want to write a critical analysis about the way you put your hands to my throat, the way you threw me against the partition wall. I want to extract a dose of worldly wisdom for all women to sap the power from that pain and into abstraction so we can all live again; I want what you did to be a statistic, I want you to be a memory, I don’t want you to be those hands on my throat.