A Perilous Path: Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law by Sherrilyn Ifill, Loretta Lynch, Bryan Stevenson, and Anthony Thompson. 

4/5 rating.

Book #4 of 2020. Read January 8, 2020.

This book was an incredible meld of four powerful and influential minds. The dialogue is taken from an NYU discussion as a part of the launch of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law.

Let me just say that this short book should be on everyone’s reading list this year. The topics it covers stretch across the entirety of America. This is definitely a place where my input would be a travesty as compared to the speakers words, so I will include a few of my favorite quotes and hope that everyone who reads this begins to make the move towards supporting a more Equal and Just America: 

“But to me the message of the Civil Rights Movement has always been, ‘These are all of our issues. All of us are different. All of us can and have been marginalized at some time.’” 

“Most people think, well, if we talk about slavery, lynching, segregation, someone is going to have to get punished. And I just want to say to people, ‘I don’t have any interest in punishing America for its past.’…I want to liberate us…I want to deal with this smog created by our history of racial inequality, so we can all breathe something healthy, feel something healthy.” 

“When I go through the Holocaust Museum, I walk through it, and I’m shaken. And what I say is, ‘never again.’…And if we get enough people in this country to say ‘never again’ to this history of racism and bigotry, we won’t be facing some of the problems we’re facing right now.” 

“You don’t get to be hopeless, and then call yourself someone who’s trying to do justice.” 

“This is hard work. It has always been hard work. But it is the best work that you will ever do – the work of bending your shoulder, and making this world a little bit better, in whatever way comes to you. It is the best thing you’ll ever do; it’ll make you the best person you will ever be.”

Additional Quotes:

“The challenge of today’s generation has never been so clear. You’ve got to draw a line in the sand around inclusion, equity, and justice. We have work to do.”

“I’m saying, we have the power, with investments, to make the society we want to make.”

“Then I think we have to talk socioculturally. The thing I’m fascinated with right now, is that Alabama’s constitution still prohibits black and white kids from going to school today. It is in the state constitution. And the only way you can get it out of the state constitution is to have a statewide referendum, where people vote on whether to remove that segregation language out of the constitution. We have tried twice now to get the language removed. In 2004, 52 percent of the people in the state voted to keep the language in the state constitution. In 2012, after the election of Barack Obama, the number went up to 63 percent.”

“And I want to emphasize that last word, because one of the problems we have when we start talking about race is that we don’t always want to act strategically. And we don’t win when we don’t act strategically. It’s frustrating to act strategically, because you don’t get to say what you want when you want it. You have to say it at the right time and in the right way. And that’s painful at times.”

“I sit down with twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys who tell me that they don’t expect to free or alive by the time they’re twenty-five. And they’re not saying that based on something they’ve seen on TV. That’s what they’re seeing in their world.”

“They may be expressed differently, they may come at us in a different way, but the economic issues facing poor people, people of color, people in poverty in Appalachia, in deep pockets of the South – life is as hard for poor whites as it is for poor blacks. And as we don’t bring those groups together. We’ve let the narrative of racial differences supersede that, and separate those discussions.”

“I think people think about civil rights as something that over here, these black people are doing. And what I always want people to understand is that that kind of equality principle is actually unifying, and essential to unite us all.”

“I think one of the lessons from the Civil Rights Movement is that people who were not African American stood with African Americans – when they were getting beaten at sit-in counters, when they were getting beaten on the march from Selma to Montgomery – those were the people who were really the allies. Standing after the law has passed, when you’re at the White House singing something, that’s not so meaningful. But when you’re there, engaged in struggle, where people are trying to kill you, and people lost their lives – that’s the time when you need to actually stand up and say, ‘I’m going to be with that group.’”

“My own view is that you change what you can change. And one of the ways that change can happen in this country is by understanding where dollars go, and by controlling the money.”

“We’re doing this cultural work, and for me it’s been very energizing, because when I went to South Africa, and what I experienced there was that people insisted on making sure I understood the damage that was done by apartheid. When I talked to Rwandans, you can’t spend time in Rwanda without them telling you about all of the damage done by the genocide. I go to Berlin, and you can’t go a hundred meters without seeing those markers and monuments that have been placed near the homes of Jewish families that were abducted during the Holocaust. The Germans want you to go to the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. And then I come to this country, and we don’t talk about slavery.

“But we don’t do mistakes very well. We don’t apologize very well. And if you don’t learn to be shameful about shameful misbehavior, you’ll keep doing that behavior over and over again. I think if you say, ‘I’m sorry,’ it doesn’t make you weak, it makes you strong.”

“I think we have to create that cultural moment where apologizing becomes okay. And part of the reason why we don’t want to talk about this history is we’ve become such a punitive society. Most people think, well, if we talk about slavery, lynching, segregation, someone is going to have to get punished. And I just want to say to people, ‘I don’t have any interest in punishing America for its past.’ I represent people who have done really terrible things. I’m not interested in prioritizing punishment. I want to liberate us. I want to get to the point where we can say, ‘That was bad and that was wrong and we need to get to someplace better!’ I want to deal with this smog created by our history of racial inequality, so we can all breathe something healthy, feel something healthy.”

“When I go through the Holocaust Museum, I walk through it, and I’m shaken. And what I say is, ‘never again.’ We need to create places in this country where you come and you have an experience with the history of slavery and lynching and segregation, and when you come out you say, ‘never again.’ And if we get enough people in this country to say ‘never again’ to this history of racism and bigotry, we won’t be facing some of the problems we’re facing right now.”

“My own view is that we have very, very short memories. And we really need to engage an understanding of the people who came before us, and what they actually had to overcome. And I’m not even just talking about black people. Because really, the world has come apart time and again over hundreds of years.”

“Someone, somewhere in your line, had to overcome poverty or war or famine or devastation, or terrible health, or injustice. And I think our disconnection from those stories so so deep that we sometimes think we can’t survive what we can survive.”

“My head is bloodied but not bowed.”

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