Against White Fragility

While I am clearly not qualified to speak on race, neither is Robin DiAngelo. I wrote this after reading her book because I think that of all the takes on how to alleviate racism, the one that centers around “shaming white people for being white”, and refuses systemic reform is the one least likely to accomplish anything. If anything, this approach turns real problems into social capital for progressive well-off white people that can be used to virtue signal allyship.

I go into detail on this, but you don’t have to read that. Read other perspectives from people significantly more qualified than me or DiAngelo.

Books:

• Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
• Alex Haley and Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
• Edward Said, Orientalism
• James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
• Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony
• Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
• Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life
• Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Articles/Essays/Letters:

• Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark
• Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak
• Kimberle Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex
• Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Guide Quotes

What is crucial here is that unless we can manage to accept, establish some kind of dialog between those people whom I pretend have paid for the American dream and those other people who have not achieved it, we will be in terrible trouble. I want to say, at the end, the last, is that is that is what concerns me most. We are sitting in this room, and we are all, at least I’d like to think we are, relatively civilized, and we can talk to each other at least on certain levels so that we could walk out of here assuming that the measure of our enlightenment, or at least, our politeness, has some effect on the world. It may not.

—James Baldwin, The Baldwin-Buckley Debate

Yes, the whites were as miserable as their black victims, I thought. If this country can’t find its way to a human path, if it can’t inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us, black as well as white, are going down the same drain… I picked up a pencil and held it over a sheet of white paper, but my feelings stood in the way of my words. Well, I would wait, day and night, until I knew what to say. Humbly now, with no vaulting dream of achieving a vast unity, I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal.

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.

—Richard Wright, Black Boy

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

—Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers

What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?

All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,
Else it were time lost listening to me.

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

You hate me don’t you?
You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture
You’re fuckin' evil
I want you to recognize that I’m a proud monkey
You vandalize my perception but can’t take style from me
And this is more than confession
I mean I might press the button just so you know my discretion
I’m guardin' my feelings, I know that you feel it
You sabotage my community, makin' a killin'
You made me a killer, emancipation of a real nigga

—Kendrick Lamar, The Blacker the Berry

Race, Racism, Racecraft

Alex Haley: Generally speaking, what are your feelings with regard to race?

Miles Davis: I hate to talk about what I think of the mess because my friends are all colors. When I say that some of my best friends are white, I sure ain’t lying. The only white people I don’t like are the prejudiced white people. Those the shoe don’t fit, well, they don’t wear it. I don’t like the white people that show me they can’t understand that not just the Negroes, but the Chinese and Puerto Ricans and any other races that ain’t white, should be given dignity and respect like everybody else.

But let me straighten you – I ain’t saying I think all Negroes are the salt of the earth. It’s plenty of Negroes I can’t stand, too. Especially those that act like they think white people want them to. They bug me worse than Uncle Toms.

But prejudiced white people can’t see any of the other races as just individual people. If a white man robs a bank, it’s just a man robbed a bank. But if a Negro or a Puerto Rican does it, it’s them awful Negroes or Puerto Ricans. Hardly anybody not white hasn’t suffered from some of white people’s labels. It used to be said that all Negroes were shiftless and happy-go-lucky and lazy. But that’s been proved a lie so much that now the label is that what Negroes want integration for is so they can sleep in the bed with white people. It’s another damn lie. All Negroes want is to be free to do in this country just like anybody else. Prejudiced white people ask one another, “Would you want your sister to marry a Negro?” It’s a jive question to ask in the first place – as if white women stand around helpless if some Negro wants to drag one off to a preacher. It makes me sick to hear that. A Negro just might not want your sister. The Negro is always to blame if some white woman decides she wants him. But it’s all right that ever since slavery, white men been having Negro women. Every Negro you see that ain’t black, that’s what’s happened somewhere in his background. The slaves they brought here were all black.

—Interview for Playboy Magazine, 1962

Nothing handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and re-ritualize it to fit our own terrain. If race lives on today, it can do so only because we continue to create and re-create it in our social life, continue to verify it, and thus continue to need a social vocabulary that will allow us to make sense, not of what our ancestors did then, but of what we ourselves choose to do now.

—Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

Race is socially constructed. I mean by this that race is a demarcation in the territory of humanity of certain groups that is socially and culturally agreed upon, but which has no basis in material reality. Unlike other social constructions, such as money, nations, or borders, race is new. Unlike other social constructions, money again proves a good example, most people agree that a society which does not recognize race as a cultural factor at all would be preferable to the one we live in today. And yet, race and racism persists, almost like witchcraft, and we see it reinforced not only negatively, through actions that discriminate and hurt, but also, perversely, in statements of progress. To give an oft-quoted example, the view that the election of Barack Obama to the presidency indicates our move to a post-racial society in fact reinforces race by fore-fronting the race of the president as proof that race is no longer important.

Efforts to ground race in reality—and there have been many—, have failed. There is no genetic marker for race; no difference in skull measurements across the world; no difference in intelligence. Even attempts to identify race with geographical origin fail. Some 10% of White American Southerners have some African ancestry, and yet who would call them African-Americans? Because race lives in a twilight between imaginary construction and real consequence, attempts to find scientific differences among races continues, and continues to sound like hopeful/hopeless prophesying. Francis Crick, who one can accuse of many things, but not scientific illiteracy, had this to say in his book Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science:

there is no reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

The scientist’s search for evidence of things as they are is here metamorphosed into anticipation that things may turn out differently if we just look harder. Through a mental somersault, Crick turns to his own racism to ask for science to justify racism.

In a very real sense, the solution to racism is to simply stop believing in race. I do not say this lightly or off-handedly. No amount of collective amnesia would bring back the Congolese lives lost under Belgian rule at the turn of the last century, or provide reparations for their ancestors still living. Yet any society of the future that can truthfully claim the term post-racial would be one in which race is seen in the same light as we see witchcraft today. But said like this, the statement obscures just how obscenely difficult it is to slough off beliefs that are reinforced through the culture industry, materialized in the legal system, and take violent and physical aspects through policing. Race may be socially constructed, but its consequences are very real. This leads the solution minded individual to an impasse. How can we right the consequences of racism without maintaining the construction of race? Or, to make a thought experiment of it, if a socially advanced alien civilization were to visit Earth, how would they convince us all that race is obviously unreal, when society views it as obviously real?

Race is a consequence of the racist, and the racist constructs his views from a material need. If the need arises for free labor on the plantations of the colony of Virginia, the racist draws a border in his mental map of the world that strips people of Africa of their humanity, and thus strips him of the need to justify their exploitation. It is only after race has existed in the subconscious of the European, that one begins to theorize its origins. Chattel slavery was already a reality in Virginia when François Bernier published his “New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or ‘Races’ of Man that Inhabit It” in 1684. These theories are not based on anything we would recognize as fact, and yet their influence in reinforcing racist thought that sees anything but the white skin as impure or dirty is hard to measure. Here is Immanuel Kant describing blackness as a literal disease that soils whiteness:

The Negroes are born white apart from their genitals and a ring around the navel, which are black. During the first months of life the black color spreads out from these parts over the whole body.

When a Negro burns himself the spot turns white. Long illnesses also turn the Negroes quite white; but a body that has become white through illness turns blacker in death than it ever was before.

—Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 57

Racism as such is not essentially different from other forms of discrimination such as homophobia, sexism, or xenophobia, but it persists stronger than these because it is more visible, and easier to disassociate from. To discriminate against someone of Lithuanian or Irish ethnicity requires a marker that they are of that ethnicity, while discriminating against an African slave requires one only to look at the color of their skin.

Race and Power

For Robin DiAngelo, racism requires Power. That is, discrimination that comes without Power is not racism—Asian-Americans cannot be racist against African-Americans, for example—, because the group that discriminates does not have the ability to reify their discrimination through the enactment of laws. While this definition of racism points the finger at the System for the root cause of racism—a position I agree with—, it is a confusing starting point for the book for two reasons:

• It implies that marginalized white groups, such as lower class people living in Appalachia that have no qualms about using racial slurs, cannot be racist because they do not wield Power.
• It squares poorly with the rest of her thesis which focuses on individual instead of systemic action.

The problem with such a definition of racism in a book that operates at the level of individual (not societal) responsibility is that one ends up splitting hairs. Where do we situate Power? Is it in the members of the House of Representatives and the Senate? Is it in the judges of the Supreme Court? Is a police officer a racist and not merely someone who discriminates because he is legally sanctioned to inflict violence? Does he lose his status as a racist when he retires? If he is removed from his position, is the institution of the Police less racist as a result?

It can lead to trains of thought that essentialize discussion about discrimination around one axis. To give an example that DiAngelo uses in her book: Racism requires Power; Privilege is Power; all and only white people have Privilege; thus all and only white people are Racist. The issue here is not so much that it allows people of other races to defend their acts as merely discrimination, but that it can lead to ideological blindness about the state of racism, as it did in 2008 when a person of color was elected to the most powerful post on the planet, and media outlets proclaimed the start of a post-racial era.

I want to stress that I am not saying that systemic racism, that is, racism rooted in Power, is less relevant than inter-personal racism. I would argue the exact opposite in fact, as without systems to reify discriminatory opinion, racism remains an opinion, and opinions are easier to change than laws or institutions. Nor am I saying that privilege, often racially motivated, does not affect the lives we live. But we shouldn’t lose track of what we fight for when we fight for equality. We fight the boundaries that proscribe and prescribe how we can behave and think merely because of the color of our skin, the expression of our sexuality, or our preference in partners. Whether these boundaries are drawn by our institutions, reflected in our cultures, or expressed by the people around us makes little difference. Anything and anyone that denies us equal access to our shared humanity is itself inhuman.

White Fragility

White fragility refers to the inability, often violently displayed, of white people to talk about race. People may display fragility to a greater or lesser extent—there is a difference between storming out of a room, and, say, looking disgruntled—, but there is little doubt that everyone exhibits some form of fragility, and I would agree with DiAngelo that the group most likely to completely disengage from conversation when accused of racism is the white progressive. As DiAngelo says of the actions of white people when charged with racism:

These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy. I conceptualize this process as white fragility. Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage.

She identifies white progressives as those who cause most daily harm to people of color:

I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color. I define white progressives as white people who think they are not racist, or are less racist, or in the “choir,” or already “get it.” White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived.

I sympathize with this statement, and I understand why it had to be said. The typical readership of this book is the fairly affluent white progressive, and I have made a similar statement in the introduction. Wokeness can be used as social capital in majority white progressive groups, a way to signal to others that you “get it” or “support the cause” without having to do anything except show others that you “have arrived”. The white progressive may mean well, but they often replace overt racism with coded language that only makes it harder to see racism as the problem to their thinking: instead of black neighborhoods, they will say poor or crime-ridden; a school is good if it is mostly white; a workplace does not have enough diversity because minorities simply do not want to apply. You see this in how the language register changes when some people talk to others of a different race.

A white man talking to a person of color behaves exactly like a grown-up with a kid, simpering, murmuring, fussing, and coddling.

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks

White fragility is a useful concept. It can help us react better when we are, rightly or wrongly, accused of racism, and it can help us contextualize our racism in terms of white privilege and white supremacy. But, as DiAngelo points out several times, racism is systemic. Should we look for solutions in large scale systemic change? Can we, as individuals, do anything to help ourselves be less racist? For DiAngelo, the answers to these questions are: “Please don’t talk about class,” and “Feel constant shame.” I believe these answers are not only wrong, but actively harmful. Yet such answers are popular because they serve corporate interests incredibly well by both precluding talk of systemic reform, and by shifting the blame for racism onto the individual.

Class and Race

It’s a class struggle Goddammit!

—Fred Hampton, Speech given at Northern Illinois University, 1969

I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, viz, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human systems, it falls victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.

—Martin Luther King, Letter to Coretta Scott, 1952

The body of my text possess extra strength
Power-lift the powerless up out of this towering inferno
My ink so hot it burn through the journal
I’m blacker than midnight on Broadway and Myrtle
Hip-Hop passed all your tall social hurdles
Like the nationwide projects-prison-industry complex
Working-class poor, better keep your alarm set
Streets too loud to ever hear freedom ring
Say evacuate your sleep, it’s dangerous to dream
For ch-ching, cats get the “cha-pow!” You dead now
Killing fields need blood to graze the cash cow
It’s a numbers game, but shit don’t add up somehow

—Yasiin Bey, Mathematics

Class is the boogeyman in Robin DiAngelo’s mental closet. While she couches her rhetoric on class in her insistence that racism cannot be solved by only focusing on class—a point I agree with—, her refusal to acknowledge that class pays an important role makes me suspect that she is against class reform in general. This view likely agrees with that of her audience of upper class whites for whom talk of class consciousness is anathema.

Racism is not just class, but there are ways in which it is exactly class.

Towards the end of 2019, before the current pandemic, the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line was 11.1%, some 36 million people. Because the methodology of assessing poverty comes from president Johnson’s War on Poverty from the 1960s, it is possible that our understanding of poverty understates the lived experience of poverty. It is also important to note that a large number of people (about 27 million) are kept out of poverty through Social Security benefits and other welfare safety nets. Were these programs not enacted, or were they to disappear, one can estimate that some 29% of all Americans would be living in poverty. Of those 36 million that live in poverty, about half (18.5 million) live in deep poverty—their income is less than half the poverty threshold.

Poverty intersects with marginalized identity in incredibly saddening ways. In the richest nation on earth, the percentage of African-Americans in poverty is around 26.2%. 26.6% of all single parents live in poverty; 44% of all black single parents, and 33.4% of Hispanic single parents live in poverty. Children and teenagers are twice as likely to live in poverty than your average American. Some 46% of Black children and 40% of Hispanic children live in poverty. Some 15 million children are at risk of going hungry every day.

The most surefire way out poverty is through education. Schools that serve low-income neighborhoods are underfunded and understaffed. Poverty begets poverty. Children of low-income parents are 4 times more likely to drop out of high school than those of upper-middle class parents. High-school dropouts are 3.5 times more likely to be arrested than people with a high-school degree. Prison is the end of the hope of a productive life. Poverty begets crime. People without a high school diploma are half as likely to vote as those with a college diploma. The poor remain politically invisible. Around 550,000 people in the United States are homeless. A third of them will never escape homelessness. Every year, between 17,000 and 45,000 people die on the streets.

It is not just class. No problem can be reduced to a single axis. But, and call me an ignorant Marxist for believing this, I cannot think of a single more effective way of reducing the problems that racial minorities face than wealth redistribution. To lift millions out of poverty is just; to provide shelter and warmth to the homeless is just; to ensure the single mother has enough food to feed her children is just; to show the teenager growing up in the inner city a path to better life through education is just. Such actions would be race blind, and yet deeply race aware because it is access to land, shelter, food, education, and political representation that kept the millions lifted out of slavery in 1865 in continued oppression.

So long as the American consciousness remains obsessed with a founding mythology peopled by abhorrent racists, then just economic reform will not be enough to alleviate racism. The culture industry will continue to perpetuate racist stereotypes if those racist stereotypes exist in its founding mythos. But at the same time, no amount of cultural reform will erase racism if the economic substructure continues to reify that there are tangible differences between people of different races and ethnicities.

And finally, if you oppose economic reform because racist lower-class Whites would benefit just as much, I have advice: Grow up.

As Michelle Alexander writes:

The future of our democracy may depend on other racial and ethnic groups learning to see that our fates are, in fact, inescapably intertwined. If we, as a nation, are ever to free ourselves from the logic and politics of white supremacy, we must not allow ourselves to imagine that progress is made if the system causes greater harm to “them” than “us”. Nor can we be seduced into believing that ending racially hostile rhetoric is the same thing as ending systems of racial and social control, or that simply electing a different president or a different political party will necessarily free us from the history and cycle of creating caste-like systems in America. More is required of us in these times.

—The New Jim Crow, pg. xliv

It is not just class. No amount of economic reform would uplift the millions of black men that must live life under the shadow of a criminal record for a crime that is no longer a crime. No amount of wealth redistribution would change the fact that some 6,000 people will slave away for life on a plantation in Louisiana.

The Gordian knot of race and class does not untangle neatly. And while I can sit on a chair of idealism and claim that revolution is the sword that will cut through injustice, I do not know that life would improve. It might not.

The Non-performativity of Shame

It would seem that to continue to see race of people, any race of people as one single personality is an ignorance of gothic proportions, an ignorance so vast, so public, and perception so blind and so blunted, imagination so bleak that no nuance, no subtlety, no difference among them can be ascertained.

—Toni Morrison, A Humanist View

A paradox is clear. The shameful white subject expresses shame about its racism, and in expressing its shame, it ‘shows’ that it is not racist: if we are shamed, we mean well. The white subject that is shamed by whiteness is also a white subject that is proud about its shame. The very claim to feel bad (about this or that) also involves a self-perception of ‘being good’. Anti-racism may even provide the conditions for a new discourse of white pride.

—Sara Ahmed, The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism

The operative emotion of fragility is shame, and shame is unproductive. As Sara Ahmed points out in her essay “The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism”, admitting shame about past or present actions signals to others that we have come a long way, but the statement also serves to absolve the speaker of further action. Merely saying something leads one to believe they have accomplished part of it.

The discourse of shame, if aligned only along the axis of race, can lead to negative outcomes. To associate race to the shame we feel for our actions can lead us to essentialize race. To show that we have arrived, we focus our effort not only on our racism, but also on weeding out racism in others, and turn from sinner to inquisitor. This plays out most often in situations where white progressives tend to identify and prosecute milder forms of racism such as micro-aggressions much harsher than minorities say they experience them. Shame can take on negative dimensions when it is used as social capital among progressive whites, and this capital is not put to use amplifying the voices of minorities that have been historically and systemically deprived of a platform, but rather as a form of virtue signaling.

Shame is the emotion at display in advice such as “be less white” which DiAngelo repeats in her book, and forms the basis of diversity training programs which, unfortunately, do not work. Beyond their ineffectiveness, such approaches can turn harmful if white progressives come to believe differently than minorities on issues about identity and race, and adopt paternalistic and essentializing attitudes towards minorities that do not toe the party line.

To make it clear what I am saying: If one does not want to discuss systemic reform, then it is much better to frame the problem around amplifying minority voices than around shaming majority ones. In both cases, people may exhibit fragility, but only in one case will minorities benefit. Efforts such as Black History Month, or the push towards greater representation in media are examples of positive reinforcement of anti-racist behavior. Of course, a truly post-racial society would require neither of these efforts, but reality is not post-racial. Hatred is often rooted in not knowing. It is hard to hate up close.

To erase the boundaries society draws around us and which we often unwillingly deepen requires courage and compassion. Courage to stand and protest a system that has proven time and again its willingness to dehumanize people for the color of their skin, and compassion to forgive those whose discrimination is rooted in their environment, and who may change if given an opportunity at dialogue with those they claim they hate. To refuse change and dialogue is to become complicit in the discrimination you say you oppose.

Conclusion

There is a useful book hiding within this one. The three quarters of it that make up an explanation of systemic racism; of avenues by which it is propagated, both consciously and unconsciously; of how racism reflects as negation the experience of whiteness; of how whiteness is never discussed as such but only as a default from which race stems; of white privilege and its manifestations; of white supremacy and its institutionalization; and of white fragility. All of these topics need to be understood, and they are presented well. But the rest, the last quarter of the book that discusses action and pedagogy represents the most milquetoast liberal solution for a problem that can find no resolution in the meeting rooms of the diversity seminar. This book absolves middle-class whites that are content with the status quo of any need to change it. It is enough to self-abnegate. Heaven is achieved not through the action of good deeds, but the confessions of sins.

The idea that racism can be alleviated through shame without dialogue and revolution, that the Other is just a foil to expiate the racist from the pangs of racism but plays no other role in the struggle for their liberation, is just another milquetoast liberal idea that props up the status quo by promoting inaction from the very people with most power to act towards change. In the world of Robin DiAngelo, racism is original sin and baptisms are performed for $160 a seat at her corporate diversity seminars.

Read something else.

I will leave you with a story Dave Brubeck tells of his jazz career and his fight against racism as an example of how to enact positive change:

I wasn’t allowed to play in some universities in the United States, and out of twenty-five concerts, twenty-three were cancelled unless I would substitute my black bass player for my old white bass player, which I wouldn’t do. They wouldn’t let us go on with Gene [Wright] and I wouldn’t go on without him. So there was a stalemate and [we were] in a gymnasium, a big basketball arena on a big campus. And the kids were starting to riot upstairs. So the President of the school had things pushing him from every side: The kids stamping on the floor upstairs, me refusing to go on unless I could go on with my black bass player. 

So we just stalled and the bus driver came and said, “Dave, hold out. Don’t go on. The president is talking to the governor and I think things are going your way.” And the governor says, “You’d better let them go on.” So we held on and the president of the college came in and he said, “Now you can go on with the understanding that you’ll keep Eugene Wright in the background where he can’t be seen too well.” And I told Eugene, “Your microphone is off and I want you to use my announcement microphone so you gotta come in front of the band to play your solo.” Well the audience went crazy. We integrated the school that night. The kids wanted it; the president wanted it; the teachers wanted it. The president of the college knew he might lose his funding from the state. So here’s the reason you fight is for the truth to come out and people to look at it.

Nobody was against my black bass player. They cheered him like he was the greatest thing that ever happened for the students. Everybody was happy. My point is those students had hired me in twenty-five universities. And twenty-three had to cancel because of what they thought they would lose from the state government. But they wouldn’t lose it. We went back and played all of those schools in a few years. And we’ve had a lot of terrible things happen to us while we’re fighting to have equality - police escorts from the airport to the university, or where I wouldn’t go on [stage] until the blacks could come in or [until they] didn’t have to sit in the balcony. I wouldn’t play until they were in the front row. You gradually stop all these ridiculous old rules that nobody really believes in.

End Quotes

The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor—when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality, in its praxis. To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.

—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

For it is not true that the work of man is finished,
That we have nothing more to do in the world,
That we are just parasites in this world,
That it is enough for us to walk in step with the world,
For the work of man is only just beginning and it remains to conquer all,
The violence entrenched in the recess of his passion,
And no race holds a monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of strength, and
There is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory.

—Aimé Césaire, Return to my Native Land