135 Quotes by Louis Yako

Having an institutional blessing to be called a ‘writer’, ‘journalist’ or an ‘academic’ does not really make one so. In fact, anyone with institutional support and titles is a suspect more than anything else.

If anything, sources that have the support and protection of power and institutions should be treated as suspicious not superior. There are very few words that make me as nauseous as words like ‘prestige’ and ‘prestigious’. Prestige is often a shortcut for getting power’s approval and blessings, which automatically, in my view, should disqualify any intellectual from being taken seriously.

We have become at once the dagger and the wound. Wounds never heal so long as they continue to cooperate with daggers. In a sense, the cure is in the disease itself. Our silence is the disease. Our serious commitment for change and for exposing power abuses and bullies is the cure.

[W]e are the ones to blame for enabling and even nourishing the toxic workplaces. In continuing to cooperate with a profoundly unhealthy and exploitative employment system, we become at once the dagger and the wound. Wounds never heal so long as they continue to cooperate with daggers. In a sense, the cure is in the disease itself. Our silence is the disease. Our serious commitment for change and for exposing power abuses and bullies is the cure.

When asked, every other White privileged American—especially males—will tell you that their dream is to have their own company and brew their own beer! Ironically, their dream springs out of the total misery and toxic work environments they experience. Yet, instead of challenging and changing this reality for all, they dream of walking away and having their own company to repeat the same old game again.

The hierarchy of most workplaces in America looks very much like climbing high mountains—the higher you get, the whiter the scenery becomes.

Keeping our focus on racist individuals is not only futile, but it also spends a precious energy that we need to direct at changing the entire structure and the system in place as we have it. We must understand that the system and the structure we have in place are created by the powerful 1% that clearly benefits from racism as a form of governance.

[W]e need to acknowledge that violence begets violence. There are no violent people who were not first violated.

We have to bear in mind that oppression is almost never imposed on people in one big dose, because that could trigger an immediate revolution and uprising. Instead, oppression is given in small doses in such a way that each dose in itself is insignificant or negligible, but it is the total amount of these small doses that creates a great state of oppression and injustice.