23 Quotes by Debby Irving

White people must learn how to listen to the experiences of people of color for racial healing and justice to happen.

Racism demands an artificial and divisive construction of humanity, in terms of how I make sense of others and also how I envision myself.

I can tell you how exceptionally easy it is to be ignorant of the racial forces that have shaped my life and views, and how effortless it was not to make the connection that much of my comfort has been built on the backs of enslaved Africans, Chinese railroad workers, and other people of color, who, for much of history, were brought here or allowed here to work their tails off fueling America’s growth yet not be considered full Americans.

We keep people down by lowering our expectations of them and then forcing them to live down to them.

About this time I came across Edmund Burke’s quote “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” That’s me, I thought. I’ve been doing nothing. I hadn’t been doing nothing because I didn’t care or lacked the courage. I did nothing, at least nothing with any real impact, because I didn’t understand how racism worked. If you can’t see a problem for what it is, how can you step in and be a part of its solution, no matter how good a person you are?

Trying to protect children by providing a worry-free childhood is a privilege of the dominant class – a white privilege. Many parents of color teach their.

When I got honest with myself, I had to own up to the fact that I’d bought into the myth of white superiority, silently and privately, explaining to myself the pattern of white dominance I observed as a natural outgrowth of biologically wired superior.

The sooner you can become comfortable with seeking what you don’t know, as opposed to proving what you do, the more you will learn and the more effective you’ll become as a racial justice advocate.

Whiteness, it turns out, is but a pigment of the imagination.