Michele Norris Quotes

There is often grace in silence. But there is always power in understanding.

Peace. It’s out there. Let’s work to find it. Let’s work to make it. Let’s work to hold on to it as something real and attainable.

How well do you know the people who raised you? Look around your dining room table. Look around at your loved ones, especially the elders. The grandparents and the aunts and uncles who used to give you shiny new quarters and unvarnished advice. How much do you really know about their lives. Perhaps you've heard that they served in a war, or lived for a time in a log cabin, or arrived in this country speaking little or no English. Maybe they survived the Holocaust or the Dust Bowl. How were they shaped by the Depression or the Cold War, or the stutter-step march towards integration in their own community? What were they like before they married or took on mortgages and assumed all the worries that attend the feeding, clothing, and education of their children? If you don't already know the answers, the people who raised you will most likely remain a mystery, unless you take the bold step and say: Tell me more about yourself.

Racism is a shape-shifter. It is not the same thing today as it was yesterday, and it will not be the same tomorrow or ten years from now. That’s shorthand for the academic definition that describes racism as a ‘multi-dimensional , highly adaptive system that ensures unequal power and distribution of resources among racial groups.’ The group that controls he levers of paw and distribution of resources weaves the interests into the gears of that system.

The word Minnesota comes from a Dakota phrase meaning “sky-tinted water” or “land where the water is so clear it reflects the sky.” So yes, the state—my beloved home state—takes its name from the language of Indigenous people whom it forcibly removed from the land. Take a moment to take that in.

Beauty standards are something different altogether - the product of a capitalist, colonialist system that through laws, customs, messaging and media portrayals created a metric meant to elevate some by ensuring a large group of outsiders were held at a lower rung.

Beauty is given upon birth to all who walk this Earth like a gift that can be nurtured, embraced, or cherished just as easily as it can be twisted, extinguished, or denied by forces that believe they wield the power to police someone's worth.