I Read Sometimes

“In fact, a tendency to favor the powerful could be said to be one of American law’s defining features.”

“And at the Nuremberg trials that followed World War II, Nazis who had carried out 375,000 forced eugenic sterilizations cited Buck v. Bell in defense of their actions.”

“When legal scholars rank the Supreme Court’s worst decisions, the competition is considerable. Throughout its history, the court has often—critics would say predictably—been on the wrong side of justice.”

“For ideas alone do not make a religion powerful, although it cannot succeed without them; equally important are social and political structures that identify and unite people into a common affiliation.”

“Some of us are restrained by fear of what could happen to us if we resist. In our naïveté, we are less fearful of what could happen to us—or is already happening to us—if we don’t resist.”

“Racist ideas love believers, not thinkers.”

“What if different kinds of environments lead to different kinds of achievement rather than different levels of achievement? What if the intellect of a low-testing Black child in an impoverished Black school is different from—and not inferior to—the intellect of a high-testing White child in a rich White school? What if we measured intelligence by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environments? What if we measured intellect by an individual’s desire to know? What if we realized the best way to ensure an effective educational system is not by standardizing our curricula and tests but by standardizing the opportunities available to all students?”

“The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade Black minds and legally exclude Black bodies.”

“But crime bills have never correlated to harm any more than fear has correlated to actual violence. We are not meant to fear suits with policies that kill. We are not meant to fear good White males with AR-15s. No, we are to fear the weary, unarmed Latinx body from Latin America. The body kneeling to Allah is to be feared. The black body from hell is to be feared. Adept politicians and police and prison entrepreneurs manufacture the fear and stand before voters to deliver them—messiahs who will liberate them from fear of these other bodies.”

“From the beginning, to make races was to make racial hierarchy.”

“He said that he doesn’t believe we become different people as we age. No, he says he believes that we become more people. We’re still the kids we were, but we’re also the people who’ve lived all the different ages since that time.”

“There are empty rooms, and then there are rooms that feel crowded, corner to corner, with emptiness, with absence.”

“After all, isn’t every unspoken thought a secret?”

“She needed to judge her friends and family by their actions, not their thoughts, for thoughts are fleeting and temperamental, the reflection of a moment, and are very often confused and misleading. Thoughts formed into spoken words are a different matter, and actual deeds are a different matter still.”

“What were miracles, but science that man didn’t yet understand?”

“But for all that life-shaping power, race is a mirage, which doesn’t lessen its force. We are what we see ourselves as, whether what we see exists or not. We are what people see us as, whether what they see exists or not. What people see in themselves and others has meaning and manifests itself in ideas and actions and policies, even if what they are seeing is an illusion. Race is a mirage but one that we do well to see, while never forgetting it is a mirage, never forgetting that it’s the powerful light of racist power that makes the mirage.”

“If we don’t do the basic work of defining the kind of people we want to be in language that is stable and consistent, we can’t work toward stable, consistent goals.”