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Highlights first synced by [[readwise]] [[September 2nd, 2020]]

• in fact the fury was in response to many of the varied inequities, injustices, and abuses that Donald Trump’s ascendance had made so visible. Patrisse Khan-Cullors would say in 2018, “The fight against 45 is not just against him. It’s a bigger fight against white supremacy. It’s a bigger fight against patriarchy. It’s a fight against classism.” (Location 923)
• “To the men scratching their heads in concern and confusion: The rage you see right now, the rage bringing down previously invulnerable men today, barely scratches the surface. You think we might be angry? You have no idea how angry we are.” (Location 980)
• Social movements are necessarily about challenging social controls. This is what social change is built on, and what America’s politics themselves are built on, that political act that Maxine Waters could see twenty-five years earlier when others simply saw “riots” and “thugs”: insurrection. (Location 1005)
• We must train ourselves to even be able to see and hear anger from women and understand it not only as rational, but as politically weighty. (Location 1049)
• We are primed to hear the anger of men as stirring, downright American, as our national lullaby, and primed to hear the sound of women demanding freedom as the screech of nails on our national chalkboard. That’s because women’s freedom would in fact circumscribe white male dominion. (Location 1051)
• There’s perhaps no neater example of how rage is an emotion that is permitted and encouraged in (some) men—and can be used to their advantage—while for women it is forbidden, invalidated, and treated as a path to self-defeat, than the 2016 presidential election. (Location 1331)
• The way that a minority power protects itself from the potential uprising of a majority is to discourage unification of that majority. And the best way to discourage unification is to split the majority against itself, by offering benefits and protections of power to some, while denying them to others. (Location 2347)
• Frequently, in those months, I was asked about how to address men’s confusion and again, their discomfort: How were they supposed to flirt? What if their respectful and professional gestures of affiliation had been misunderstood? Mothers told me of sons worried about being misinterpreted, that expression of their affections might be heard as coercion, their words or intentions read incorrectly, that they would face unjust consequences that would damage their prospects. The amazing thing was the lack of acknowledgment that these anxieties are the normal state for just about everyone who is not a white man: that black mothers reasonably worry every day that a toy or a phone or a pack of Skittles might be seen as a gun, that their children’s very presence—sleeping in a dorm room, sitting at a Starbucks, barbecuing by a river, selling lemonade on the street—might be understood as a threat, and that the repercussions might extend far beyond a dismissal from a high-paying job or expulsion from a high-profile university, and instead might result in arrest, imprisonment, or execution at the hands of police or a concerned neighbor. Women enter young adulthood constantly aware that their inebriation might be taken for consent, or their consent for sluttiness, or that an understanding of them as having been either drunk or slutty might one day undercut any claim they might make about having been violently aggressed upon. Women enter the workforce understanding from the start the need to work around and accommodate the leering advances and bad jokes of their colleagues, aware that the wrong response might change the course of their professional lives. (Location 3590)
• with these calls came no acknowledgment of sympathies that we have never before been asked to extend: to black men who have always lived with higher rates of unemployment and who have faced systemically higher prison sentences and social disapprobation for their drug use; to the women whose careers and lives had been ruined by ubiquitous and often violent harassment. Now the call was to consider the underlying pain of those facing repercussions. (Location 3604)
• Control was Jordan Peterson’s Taoist white serpent, thrust at us against our will. (Location 3640)
• To suggest to other women that they should simply let it out, channel their fury and scream it to the world, would be to repeat a long history of well-intentioned, idealistic, but ultimately impractical approaches to feminist strategy: the urging of individual women to work around or within the systems that have not been built to accommodate or even acknowledge them. (Location 4279)
• treat the anger of women as we treat the anger of white men. (Location 4299)
• The desire to push disruptive social fury back down underground is strong. The rage must be stronger still, to resist the pull of apathy, the censure of the powerful. (Location 4306)
• changes in law, policy, representation, power, a remaking not only of rules to better support equality—via criminal justice and environmental reform, the expansion of reproductive justice, of workers’ rights and strengthening of a social safety net—but a reformation of the very attitudes that have permitted inequality to be codified again and again. (Location 4313)
• movements are made up of moments, strung out over months, years, decades. They become discernible as movements—are made to look smooth, contiguous, coherent—only after they have made a substantive difference. (Location 4319)
• No deus ex machina is going to appear to announce to those agitating for revolutionary change in the United States and around the world that the project we have embarked upon is a movement; no one can promise that our work now will remap our landscape and remake our future. That burden is on those of us who want desperately for it to do so. We determine whether or not we change the world. (Location 4325)
• we should remember that with each imperfect, and eventually stalled, stage of major social change has come some real progress: expanded enfranchisement, increases in liberty for more kinds of people, greater bodily autonomy. (Location 4348)