Season 7, Episode 2: HBCUs, The Empire and Whatever else

“Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life.”
― Percival Everett, The Trees

 

Jenny — Vulnerability becomes the scapegoat

“It felt like a projection of vulnerability. We don’t want to acknowledge how precarious one medical bill could be, one school bill could be. And so I think there becomes this hatred of whoever represents vulnerability. And right now that feels really loud for the immigrant community. There’s this vitriol from privileged spaces because we don’t want to sit with how precarious our privilege is and how that squeeze is happening. And so what always happens? There becomes a scapegoat rather than looking at, wait, how do we address the systems that are squeezing us so that we don’t have people in these vulnerable situations in the first place?”

 

Rebecca — Masculinity and the inability to say “I don’t know”

“Having watched him, the ways in which I now understand how men are not allowed to say things like, ‘I don’t know, and I’m not sure. And I need to look that up.’ … There’s something there in the ways in which we are allowed to be in society that I think can invite this: Dude, why can’t you just pause, step out of the room, go look it up, and then come back and cite the person from whom you got the answer? Why can’t you just say, ‘They’re an expert and they’re telling me the answer is this, so that’s what we’re going with’?”

 

Danielle — Who gets imagined as belonging

“Someone told me that because of my pain and zeal, I make a lot of unjustified charges against various groups of people and that builds more barriers and walls between white people and Latinos. And it was just like—yeah, because in the end there’s this internal bodily drive to live in a certain kind of reality, to see the world from a certain kind of space. And you don’t fit in that reality. I don’t fit in it. My family doesn’t fit in it. Your family doesn’t. So therefore, you vote based on your reality…. It’s better without you. No matter what, as long as you’re gone, our life will be better. Who cares about healthcare? As long as you’re not here, life is better.”

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.