diversity wins

Ask yourself: Who is my brother? If the answer isn’t ‘everyone’, then how do we decide who is and who is not our brother?

From defeat I learned to give love when I was empty. I learned to love those who struck out at me without warning and who took from me when I was already empty.

Diversity Wins.

Ending inequality is an impossible task, of course, given human frailty. And yet we must persist.

Bias is a built-in error that makes everything that comes after it wrong. Once we accept a biased idea as true, it colors all our other thoughts even though it is wrong.

Without blame or accusation, we are responsible for keeping our side of the street clean. Small acts are effective because many people do nothing at all.

The problem of race is not solvable unless we accept as valid that our lives today are connected to an ancient past that lives and breaths in us now.

It’s not enough to only do no harm. We have to be willing to love the unknown and to love that which we hate or fear.

Just say it: I am responsible.

Change is going to take some time. Even though we know this, it is good to remind ourselves that change will not happen overnight.

Being uncomfortable is not a crime. If we are brave, being uncomfortable is an opportunity to create something real from something we can only imagine.

All we have to have is the willingness to be aware and possibly uncomfortable. You never know when your positive words will break someone’s string of negative experiences.

The most painful part is admitting to ourselves that we have biases when we thought we didn’t. It means we use words like ‘colorblind’ to talk with people who are just like us to make ourselves feel better about injustice but we don’t actually do anything about it.

No matter what it is we strive for we will inevitably run up against someone who has every intention of either stopping us from reaching our goal or taking it away from us once we have attained it. Martin Luther King Jr.’s methods of nonviolent resistance are the only way I can see to keep what I have worked for without resorting to the tactics of the bullies we run into in every area of life.

Once we are moving and as long as we have goals, we will be able to tell when it is time to make a course correction. I didn’t know about course correction until recently; I thought success was one long straight line.