Mychal Denzel Smith Quotes

And the more the image of black men is connected to everything wrong with the world, the easier it is to justify killing us. Racism comes to be seen as a natural reaction to the existence of black monsters.

Our struggle has inspired oppressed people the world over, because if former slaves can make the most powerful nation face itself, there's a chance for everyone else. In a twist, our rage becomes hope for others.

The nigger is America's greatest asset and its biggest fear

We shouldn't be seeking the respect of an unjust system that will not respect us on the basis of our humanity alone.

Anger is what makes our struggle visible, and our struggle is what exposes they hypocrisy of a nation that fashions itself a moral leader. To rise against the narrative and expose the lie gives opportunity to those whose identity depends on the lie to question and, hopefully, change.

To my Newly Forming Black Radical mind, women -- more specifically black women -- had a way of existing without being present. It's a natural result of consuming history and culture through the fables of masculine triumph.

What would we happen if we reframed the way we understand black male life in a way that took mental health seriously? If we looked outside and didn't see ruthless gangbangers, but teenage boys left hopeless and giving themselves suicide missions. If instead of chastising young men for fighting over sneakers we asked why they felt worthless and unseen without them. If we didn't label them junkies, but rather recognized their need for affirmation.

He failed to appeal to the American ego, to be a cheerleader for American exceptionalism.

There are those of us who can retreat to a fantastical America, and those of us who are always here—stuck.

One of the privileges of not being a part of a marginalized group is believing you can set your own benchmarks for bigotry.

The most insidious and remarkable quality of American mythmaking is the ability to swallow up the lives of those who stood in open rebellion to the American project and turn them into obedient symbols of American exceptionalism.

Anger is what makes our struggle visible, and our struggle is what exposes the hypocrisy of a nation that fashions itself a moral leader. To rise against the narrative and expose the lie gives opportunity to those whose identity depends on the lie to question and, hopefully, change.

We make a grave mistake every time we invoke the history of oppression to diminish the reality of racism's present. Progress is real, but the narrative of progress seduces us into inaction. If we believe, simply, that it gets better, there is no incentive to do the work to ensure that it does.

He did everything. He studied hard. He went to Harvard. He got married. He had children. He worked. He dreamed big. He pulled his bootstraps all the way up from his humble beginnings to the presidency. He lived the American Dream. And he was called an African Witch Doctor. People asked for his birth certificate. A congressman shouted at him "YOU LIE!" He faced the most recalcitrant Republican Congress ever that was elected by a constituency that wanted to "take the country back."If a black man can be elected as guardian of the American empire, do exactly that, and still not be shielded from racism, what hope is supposed to be left?

But the anger has not only drawn attention to injustice; it has driven people to action, sparking movements and spurring them forward. At the very least, the public expression of black rage has allowed communities and people who have felt isolated in their own anger to know that they are not alone. Anger is what makes our struggle visible.

The problem is when progress becomes its own ideology—that is, when advocacy for incrementalism is seen as the astute and preferred mode of political transformation. It is never easy to win, but progress is also never sufficient. Incremental change keeps the grinding forces of oppression—death—in place. Actively advocating for this position is a moral failure.

What I have come to accept is that being a victim of Americanism and a product of it are not mutually exclusive. It is the inescapable course for those of us who are not white, male, cis, hetero, and wealthy. Even as we suffer under the boot of oppression, we are not immune to indoctrination into the American myth. We are brought up in the very institutions that are responsible for perpetuating the lie of meritocracy, and it begins to sound plausible.

Reduced to an apolitical dreamer, he can be a tool to divert energy away from forming structural solutions to inequality and injustice while spreading grade-school-level bromides in favor of kindness.

representational progress, while important, does not necessarily translate to material progress,

the rise of movements such as Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the Dreamers illuminated the need to organize around the ongoing, structural problems that persist regardless of the political party in power at any given moment, but especially when it is the party trading on a message of progressivism. It must be possible to note a welcome change in the possibilities for marginalized people while also remaining skeptical of a system of governance that creates and maintains the conditions for their marginalization.

I find myself, and many others, saying things like this from time to time, indignant over the fact that something objectionable from the past persists in the present, as if there had been some previously agreed-upon expiration date on injustice. But what it reveals is that even those of us with a healthy understanding of what created this nation also share in shaping its fiction. There is a part of us that wants to believe the good of America can outlast the bad.

Donald Trump so undermines the idea of the president as agnostic leader that George W. Bush has come back around as a shining example of it. The scandals of the Trump White House move with such rapidity that nostalgia has set in for when they appeared only every few months. Trump has been so openly bigoted toward Muslims that Bush quotes about respecting Islam—absented the context of his all-out assault on majority Muslim countries—garner retroactive praise. Trump lies so much in service of himself that Bush’s lies in service of empire are noble by comparison. You can indulge this delusion if you don’t live in Iraq or New Orleans. Or if you didn’t lose your home because of predatory lending and treacherous Wall Street gambling. Then Bush can be your cuddly grandpa.

Douglass was addressing the white moderate, ever concerned with order, insisting that the struggle to abolish slavery would require more than an appeal to moral correctness. There would come a need for confrontation, an unsettling of the peace, or else the silence would lead only to the preservation of the institution. Douglass’s words were meant to urge action in the face of oppression.

It is only logical, from the standpoint of the empire, to swallow up anything that may threaten its existence. Dissent is inevitable but need not be destructive. By co-opting the heroes of insurgence, the empire is able to bolster its constructed moral authority.

Dr. King’s treatment as an “infallible oracle” is not laziness; his perceived infallibility is related to the message he has been chosen to deliver. Reduced to an apolitical dreamer, he can be a tool to divert energy away from forming structural solutions to inequality and injustice while spreading grade-school-level bromides in favor of kindness.

Nor are they synonymous, which is what the kneeling protests, at their most potent, reminded us. Whether or not they were “American” in nature is inconsequential if we, as Americans, have failed to provide that term with meaning beyond the delusions we pass off as national treasures.

The white supremacist political party chose a white supremacist to represent it in the presidential election. An institution created for the protection of white supremacy installed that white supremacist into the nation’s highest office.

there is violence here, just as there is violence any place where the people are stripped of the means to build a meaningful life.

academics, media professionals, policymakers, presidents—excuse the presence of the police here, and in other hoods like this one, because it is their position that in order to stop the violence of the hood you must impose the violence of the state. The police are meant, from this view, to protect the people from themselves, to enforce the discipline their culture lacks.

This is all bullshit, and once anyone encounters a police officer doing their actual job, they know it is bullshit. Police patrol and harass. They reluctantly answer questions better suited for town visitor centers. They enforce traffic laws at their discretion, or to shore up municipal budgets through the imposition of exorbitant fines. They introduce the potential for violence in response to calls about loud music. They arrest people who have disobeyed them and then make up the charges later. They dismiss the stories of rape victims; they side with domestic abusers. They commit rape and domestic abuse at higher rates than the rest of the population. They quell rebellions. They arrest freedom fighters. They shoot and kill with impunity.

No matter what other responsibilities police have assumed, they have consistently inflicted violence on the most marginalized people in society and maintained the economic, political, and social dominance of the ruling class. When I say they have not strayed too far from these roots, I mean precisely that the main function of policing has not changed. It is still an institution built on the principle of using violence to ensure that people who are exploited by the ruling class are unable to assert any pressure on their oppressors. The

But with the propaganda machine churning on, the police, and the governments that direct them, are able to get buy-in from the very people they are meant to police. The community hears the gunshots, sees the addicts wandering hopelessly and the dope boys pondering their next move, grows fearful that a shouting match will turn ugly quickly, and they have been taught by teachers, counselors, television, movies, and the police themselves that the cops can solve this problem. So they call. There is no alternative. No one will even pay for them to have trash cans. How can a community deprived of the basics expect to receive the resources they need to no longer depend on police? They have, purposefully, been given nothing else.

The police are no solution, but they are, as it were, the final solution. It matters what you see as the problems in need of solving. Is it the people or the conditions? Is it blackness or anti-blackness? Is it poverty or the poor?

They will call the police, who will arrest this person, and for a night or two they will have a place to sleep in a jail cell. The police cannot solve poverty, joblessness, and the housing crisis—the actual culprits in the lives of the homeless. But if we’ve deemed the homeless, not poverty, the problem, then what the police can do is make them disappear. The major tools the police carry are handcuffs and guns; they can arrest or kill. The police can go forth and round up the homeless, then place them in cages. And to grant them the authority, local governments can criminalize the existence of the homeless: they can criminalize sleeping outside, or criminalize panhandling, which begins to look a lot like the criminalization of vagrancy as part of the Black Codes in the era that ended Reconstruction. And then, our local governments can fund a separate police force for the subway system to punish turnstile jumpers, arrest women selling churros, and clear out more homeless people, while neighborhood associations ensure no new homeless shelters get built near or in affluent neighborhoods. The streets remain the only place for them to call home.

the ignoble pursuit of status within a gendered hierarchy leaves all tactics of domination available to the in-group of power.

Abolition offers an alternative framework for thinking through how we care for everyone who is harmed, and for considering how to reduce and prevent harm from occurring. Prison is not a means of preventing violence, but for shifting it out of sight from polite society. In this way, it becomes harder to convince a society convinced of its own politeness that a confrontation with prison is necessary. Out of sight, and so on.

Our preoccupation cannot be with how to make Ocasio-Cortez president but with how we fill the halls of power with all the Ocasio-Cortezes waiting in the wings.

This thing, whether rendered crudely or poetically, is the misguided belief that America’s history possesses something better to which we can return. But it is not there. We have not been friends, but competitors. We have not practiced affection—at our absolute best we manage tolerance. We silence our better angels before turning them into familiar devils.

refreshed Twitter every few minutes under the irrational belief that so long as I had a minute-to-minute update on the state of the world, then nothing truly catastrophic could happen.

It would be a tremendous shame for the wealthiest nation in human history to admit that the wealth it has built came at a dreadful cost to the majority of people who live here. It would reveal the lie of the whole system.

Contrary to what personal finance charlatans would have us believe, poverty is not a mindset—it is the inevitable and necessary by-product of a system wherein life is only guaranteed to those who have wealth and wealth is distributed via ownership and not labor. Poverty is a capitalist’s main resource, as it ensures there will always be a class of people to exploit.

the mandates of progressive policing are exactly the same as those of authoritarian policing, which is to say that policing is policing no matter the adjective you put in front of it.

We are asked to hold the people in uniform in high regard because they keep us safe, but never asked whether or not we actually feel safe or what we would need in order to feel safe. “Police are not public, nor good,” writes movement lawyer Derecka Purnell in Boston Review, if we genuinely consider the definition of “public” as encompassing all of us, which history shows we do not. The police are the enemies of black people, Latinx people, trans people, and poor people. Is it our duty to revere them, even as their presence conflicts with our freedom? After Ferguson? After Baltimore?

the past, I have been accused of hating the police. And I do. Such an admission may be taken to mean that I hate each police officer as an individual whom I have judged unfairly on the basis of their occupation. But I hate the police the same as I hate any institution that exists as an obstruction to justice.

justice is a proactive commitment to providing each person with the material and social conditions in which they can both survive and thrive as a healthy and self-actualized human being. This is not an easy thing to establish, as it requires all of us buying into the idea that we must take responsibility for one another. But it is the only form of a just world.

It’s a meaningful shift in language that no longer places the burden of bravery on the marginalized to “come out” to a hostile world. “Inviting in” recognizes that it isn’t the marginalized who should be responsible for the terms of their own identity, but those who have made that identity dangerous to embrace. But

And as the rest of the world watches, we still try to learn how to see ourselves.

someone, some industry, is always ready and waiting to exploit us. It appears innocent enough at first. They even convince us that the arrangement is beneficial for everyone involved. But once you realize what’s happening, that they aren’t sacrificing nearly as much as you are but somehow receiving a larger portion of the spoils, and you confront them about it, they’ll try to convince you that you’re crazy. Where they once sold you on the relationship with promises of wealth, they now threaten you with poverty. And they’re willing to employ depraved measures in order show you just how bloody life is without them. When you recognize this, you have to

Effects of racism on the psyche is the constant questioning of one’s worth and purpose. It can be almost as debilitating as death. Almost...American racism will take some of our lives while holding others of us up as exemplars of success providing the illusion that there is an escape. We do a disservice to our martyrs by imposing perfection upon them. We do a greater disservice to ourselves, the survivors and potential tokens, by not honestly reckoning with who our martyrs were and who they could have been.

Everything I read, listened to, and learned, validated my right to existence as a Black man in America but only within the confines of a patriarchal definition of masculine identity. What went unquestioned were the ways my newfound sense of Black manhood contributed to the ongoing marginalization of my mother, her twin sister, my grandmother, my high school guidance counselor, and more than half of the student population on Hampton University’s campus. I began to see myself, but only by refusing to see black women. The centrality of the Black male experience and the discourse of racist oppression has been passed down from generation to generation through our politics and culture.

A call to detach ourselves from the myth that the only and best way to raise a child depends on the presence of a man we call a father. It’s also a call to reexamine what we expect from fathers, present or not. What’s imagined is Cliff Huxtable trading wit and canned wisdom with his children before traipsing off to a job that enables to provide financially and then coming home to hand out a healthy dose of necessary discipline to keep the children well-behaved. What’s real is that having a father in the home increases the likelihood for abuse for both the spouse and children. What’s real are fathers who are broken and showing up to fill a role that they themselves are struggling to understand. We have spent so much time valorizing the mere existence of fathers we haven’t discussed what type of fathers they will be. We haven’t shown any concern for whether or not these fathers show up as full, healthy human beings.

When we say a boy needs a father, we mean, a boy needs someone to teach him how to be a patriarch. Teach him to suppress. Teach him to be unfeeling. Teach him to lead without asking. Teach him solitude. Teach him not to cope. Teach him to explode. All in the name of maintaining the myth. Every lesson my father ever taught me came back to the myth. “One day, when you have a son of your own,” he would say, “you will understand.” I have no son of my own, but I understand. I understand that my father carried the pain of being abandoned by his father and vowed to not be like him. I understand that my father became the type of father he wished he had. I understand that for him a father was meant to set an example of hard work, that he should pass along valuable life lessons about handling money, that he should teach you how to drive and tie a double windsor, that he should come down hard when you lie or fail to live up to your potential. I also understand that as a shy insecure kid who wanted someone to talk to about his fears, there was a distance between me and my father. As someone who needed to know that I would be loved even through my mistakes, my father’s raised eyebrows, and voice, and belt, weren’t reassuring. His way of buying affection without speaking through his feelings made it harder to get close. His cold reactions to some of my proudest moments didn’t ease us toward embrace. When I tell the story of my relationship with my father, the response I hear most often is, “You had it better than most. Be grateful he was there.” And once again the myth prevents us from seeing. I did have it better than most. I’ll never deny that. My father’s sacrifices meant that I never went homeless or hungry, unclothed or unwashed. Materially, I had all that I could ask for and more — he made that possible. I would not be writing these words today if he didn’t. I’m grateful. But it doesn’t mean the strain and tension between us didn’t have an effect on me - on my sense of self. I didn’t like myself for a long time and much of that had to do with never feeling like I could do anything worthy enough to receive my father’s love. Perfection, if I could achieve such a thing, felt inadequate. I know now that it isn’t true. That he loved me in the way he knew how and he always would. But that’s not what shaped me.

As I got older, watching him cling to his stoicism, never softening his edge, never opening up to his pain, made our relationship make sense, but made me mourn for what could have been. Now it isn’t about me, I wish he could be there for himself. And sometimes he tried. Every once in a while you could see him push past his own understanding of himself, and his role as a father, to be the kind of emotionally present man of my imagination. But no one ever asked him, “How did you learn to be a Black man? How did you learn to be a Black father?” And he never had to find an answer. He, like other Black men, let the script guide him more often than not.

But what this nostalgia tells me is not that Americans forget too easily. "We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing," Gore Vidal famously said, but this is only partially true. He neglected that the delusion is intentional. The preamble to our Constitution starts, "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union..." and it has been interpreted as an excuse for America's shortcomings. We are not perfect, but seek to be "more perfect." Our faults are not American, only the progress--ending slavery is American, the institution itself was not. Extending the vote to white women via constitutional amendment is American, denying them the vote for more than a century of the nation's existence was not. For the myth to hold, we can only ever view America as the sum of its best parts.

..but the effect of this is that those who champion the lies are called patriots, while anyone who takes actual American history as its history is deemed a radical.

I had athletes who, with much to lose, would put their visibility to use for the liberation of Black people.

What would happen if we reframed the way we understand Black male life in a way that took mental health seriously? If we looked outside and didn’t see ruthless gang bangers but teenage boys left hopeless and giving themselves suicide missions. If instead of chastising young men for fighting over sneakers we asked why they feel worthless and unseen without them? If we didn’t label them junkies but rather recognized their need for affirmation. If we held our boys close when they cried instead of turning them away to face the frustration, pain, and sadness like a man. If we believed Black boys were worthy of second chances that didn’t involve prison cells. What if? We might start to worry. Then, we might start to heal.

Progress can produce amnesia.

And then George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin and I asked myself, “How did you learn to be a Black man?” and I didn’t have an answer. And I went searching my life and the lives of those around me to find one. And I found not one, but many, and they didn’t all make sense, and they didn’t all make me feel better, and yet I couldn’t look away. And then I wrote furious sobering words to try and help me understand - maybe help someone else understand too. And they never felt like enough, and they still don’t. And then Michael Brown. And then Freddie Gray. And then the fire came and the nation didn’t know what to do with it. And Obama couldn’t save them. And we picked up the bricks because the ballots weren’t strong enough, and the glass broke the same way our bodies did, and they finally saw us. And as the rest of the world watches, we still try to learn how to see ourselves.

It's not that I envy her vision of America. I would never hope to be so deluded. I envy the power of her narrative imagination. She has conjured an America, someplace in history, that is “great,” and so many people are convinced of its existence that they create greater suffering in the present for people who stand to gain nothing from this imaginary restoration.

Individual safety and prosperity at the expense of solidarity can only ever replicate capitalist hierarchies and the violent means imposing them. If you view your emancipation as separate from mine, we will forever be locked in an unwinnable competition.

One of the more pernicious effects of racism on the psyche is the constant questioning of one’s worth and purpose.