Accountable Dashka Slater Quotes

Accountability is actually a conversations about what happened, why it happened, and how do we prevent it from happening again.

A definition of accountability is an understanding that a harm took place and that you are responsible for a piece of that harm.

When you are targeted for who you are, it doesn't just hurt your feelings. It hurts every cell in your body.

Powerless people bully because they want to have power over other people.

Love, you see, is the most important emotion.

noose is just a rope with a knot that can be tightened. But in America it’s a rope that tells a story. The story is about lynching—the practice of mob murder, usually by hanging but also by burning, shooting, drowning, beating, or being

dragged behind a car. Between 1887 and 1950, at least 4,384 Black people were lynched in the United States—the true number is probably higher—in public displays of brutality and terror. The vast majority of lynchings took place in the South, where white people used the noose as a means of intimidation and control. While lynching victims were usually accused of committing a crime like rape or murder, there was no need for anyone to produce evidence or witnesses. The accusation was enough.

Black people could be lynched for being too successful or too outspoken, for owning property that white people wanted, for attempting to collect their wages or other debts from white people who didn’t want to pay, for asking for food, or simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. While lynchings sometimes happened under cover of darkness, they were often public occasions in which the person who was lynched was tortured and dismembered before a mob of enthusiastic onlookers. Sometimes they were advertised in advance so that photographers would have time to set up their equipment. Later, photos of the corpses would be sold as souvenirs.

On the average, a black man, woman or child was murdered nearly once a week, every week, between 1882 and 1930 by a hate-driven white mob,” sociologists Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck write in A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930.

(The U.S. Congress didn’t pass a federal anti-lynching law until 2022, despite more than two hundred attempts over more than a hundred years.)

A noose is just a rope with a knot that can be tightened, but in America, it’s a rope that delivers a message. A noose says: Be afraid. It says: I could kill you. It says: You are powerless and your life doesn’t matter.