A Quote by Dean Spade

Critical Race Theory offers of discrimination frameworks as ways of understanding and eradicating racism. The focus on "discrimination" as the way to understand racism in the US has meant that racism is considered a question of discriminatory intentions - whether or not somebody intentionally left someone out or did something harmful because of their biased feelings about a person's race. This focus on individual racists with bad ideas hides the reality that racism exists wherever conditions of racialized maldistribution exist.

Dean Spade

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About Bad Bad Idea Bad Ideas Because Biased Conditions Considered Critical Did Discrimination Exist Exists Feelings Focus Harmful Ideas Individual Intentionally Intentions Left Meant Offers Out Person Question Race Racism Reality Somebody Someone Something Theory Understand Understanding Us Way Ways Wherever Whether

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Dean Spade
American - Writer
Born: 1977

I think some people feel that if you question the reality of race, you're questioning racism; you're saying racism isn't real. Racism is real because people actually believe race is real. We'd have to really let go of the 500-year-old idea of race as a worldview in order to undo racism.

Rachel Dolezal

Race is such a contentious issue because of the painful history of racism. Race didn't create racism, but racism created race.

Rachel Dolezal

The new racism: Racism without 'racists.' Today, racial segregation and division often result from habits, policies, and institutions that are not explicitly designed to discriminate. Contrary to popular belief, discrimination or segregation do not require animus. They thrive even in the absence of prejudice or ill will. It's common to have racism without racists.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

I think that racism has gotten more subtle, and it's not even racism anymore: it's placism. Like where you live or whether you went to community college or Harvard, and it exists within the race.

Esai Morales

In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here's the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven't lynched somebody then you can't be called a racist. If you're not a bloodsucking monster, then you can't be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

As a country, we are in a state of denial about issues of race and racism. And too many of our leaders have concluded that the way to remedy racism is to simply stop talking about race.

Lani Guinier

This film isn't about "white racism", or racism at all. DEAR WHITE PEOPLE is about identity. It's about the difference between how the mass culture responds to a person because of their race and who they understand themselves to truly be. And this societal conflict appears to be one that many share.

Justin Simien

The core of racism is the notion that the individual is meaningless and that membership in the collective - the race - is the source of his identity and value. ... The notion of 'diversity' entails exactly the same premises as racism - that one's ideas are determined by one's race and that the source of an individual's identity is his ethnic heritage.

Peter Schwartz

Another response to racism has been the establishment of unlearning racism workshops, which are often led by white women. These workshops are important, yet they tend to focus primarily on cathartic individual psychological personal prejudice without stressing the need for corresponding change in political commitment and action. A woman who attends an unlearning racism workshop and learns to acknowledge that she is racist is no less a threat than one who does not. Acknowledgment of racism is significant when it leads to transformation.

bell hooks

Law reforms in the US, ostensibly enacted to prohibit racism, have proven ineffective because they focus on bad intentions of individuals and fail to comprehend population-level conditions.

Dean Spade

Racism is like high blood pressure—the person who has it doesn’t know he has it until he drops over with a God damned stroke. There are no symptoms of racism. The victim of racism is in a much better position to tell you whether or not you’re a racist than you are.

Coleman Young

There's a difference between racism and "I don't know any better. I'm clueless." Racism is like, "I'm trying to make you feel bad." That's racism.

Chris Rock

The racism in South Asia is the most specific racism in the world. It's like racism against a slightly different language group. It's like micro-racism.

Riz Ahmed

Why go from the individual to the entire race, from the singular to the group, from the guilty to the innocent? We know why. That is how racism works. That is racism in action.

David Olusoga

We tend to think of racism as this interpersonal verbal or physical abuse, when in truth, that is only one way that racism manifests itself. The reality of contemporary racism is that it while it is ubiquitous, it is often invisible, subsequently making it more difficult to name and identify.

Clint Smith

Racial problems can't be easily reconciled with a pat account about racism and discrimination that lets us sort of relax into saying when we finally get this right, when we get rid of racism, when we reach the post-racial society, everything is going to be okay. Well, no, because along the way here, as we've not yet been in this racial nirvana, facts on the ground have been created.

Glenn Loury

A Quote by Dean Spade

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