Poc Quotes

“What's so great about being seen?" Tara demanded. "What's so important about that?"

She might have had the words for it, but I didn't. They locked up in my throat, about being invisible, about being alien and foreign and strange even in the place where I was born, and about the immortality that wove through my parents' lives but ultimately would fail them. Their immortality belonged to other people, and I hated that.”
― Nghi Vo, Siren Queen

“On the Hunger Games Fan Race fail and the portrayal of POC in fantasy literature:
It is as if the POC in the text are walking around with a great big red sign over them for some editors and it reads I AM NOT A REAL CHARACTER. I AM A PROBLEM YOU MUST DEAL WITH. The white characters are permitted to saunter about with their physical descriptions hanging out all over the place, but best not make mention of dark skin or woolly/curly hair or dark eyes (Unless, of course, that character is white. None of my white-skinned dark-eyed characters had any problem being described as such. And I’m pretty sure that Sól’s curly hair never gave anyone a single pause for thought.) As I said, I understand the desire not to define a POC simply by their physical attributes, and I understand cutting physical descriptions if no other character is described physically – but pussyfooting about in this manner with POC is doing nothing but white wash the characters themselves. It’s already much too hard to get readers to latch onto the fact that some characters may not be caucasian, why must we dance about their physical description as if it were some kind of shameful dirty little secret. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the way homosexuality used to only ever be hinted at in texts. It was up to the reader to ‘read between the lines’ or ‘its there if you look for it’ and all that total bullshit which used to be the norm.”
― Celine Kiernan

“…any way you engage with your own culture is authentic, because it’s yours.”
― Sonora Reyes, The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School

“I am treacherous with old magic
and the noon’s new fury
with all your wide futures
promised
I am
woman
and not white.”
― Audre Lorde

“by virtue of living
in a racist world
nonblack people are
raised to be antiblack
we are all taught that
lighter is better

- undoing”
― Rupi Kaur, Home Body

“Your beauty will be in shades of melanin and light.”
― R. YS Perez, I Hope You Fall in Love: Poetry Collection

“What on earth did we do wrong? What harm did we inflict? What did we do to you? Who are you to judge us?

Who gave you the right? Are you the representatives of mankind, or what? Who appointed you? Was it God? Yourselves? You don't care if someone loves to go bowling or shooting! You don't care if someone wants to be a doctor or a flight attendant! So why can't we love someone of the same gender? What makes you say that the way we love is wrong? Because we're not "normal"? Because we don't abide by the provisions of God? The laws of nature?

Well, fuck you. What a load of bullshit. You want to create a land for God? Good. Then let's bring back the regulations on sex positions first! Don't use condoms, and only fuck in the missionary position, damn it! Since sex should only be for childbirth, and any other pleasure is against the will of God, am I right? Come to think of it, you guys are fucking disgusting. I mean, I know you all fuck doggy-style and blow each other! So I guess you're all going to hell as well! The same goes for singles who don't copulate at all! If the union of man and woman is what is "normal", singles are the most abnormal of all! You're all going to hell, too! On, and let's just kill all the ugly people, fat people, and poor people while we're at it. Then it'll be heaven on earth, with no abnormal beings! Where the normal are free to kill the abnormal! If you ask me, you uneducated, narrow-minded scumbags are the ones that degrade human nobility! You're fucking revolting! Ignorant morons! Do you feel good? Or pissed off? Mad?

Then come at me! Instead of being fucking cowards, bashing someone that's all tied up. Won't it be more fun to beat up a person of color? Kill me before I infect your brains and turn all of you into homosexuals! Kill me first! Stupid scumbags!”
― JUNS, Dark Heaven

“We have to walk around being perfect all the time just to be seen as human. Don't you ever get tired of being a symbol? Don't you ever just want to be human?”
― Christina Hammonds Reed, The Black Kids

“It's not just about Rodney. It's about all of us.”
― Christina Hammonds Reed, The Black Kids

“When you hear stories from other people like you, you feel less alone. When you feel less alone, and like you have a community of people behind you, alongside you, I believe you can live a better life.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“Who you have feelings for—that is not a choice. Feelings happen
whether you want them to or not. But love isn’t a feeling; it’s the act of planting
a seed and putting in the time and care it needs to grow. It demands hard work
and renewal to survive. It demands commitment. By necessity, it cannot be taken
lightly.”
― Farah Naz Rishi, It All Comes Back to You

“With diversity things I know people are always like, "oh don't force diversity!" I'm of the opinion that if I read your book and at the end of the book I'm like, it's kinda weird that there are no black people in this? Bad world building. The way I find easiest to explain especially to people who are maybe hesitant to change, is that if you took 100 random people off of the earth and were like "here's 100 people!" The chances of every single one of them being pale white and straight are very unlikely. So when I read a book and you introduce me to over a hundred characters and every single one of them is pale white and straight, it's bad world building. It doesn't feel like a real place to me.”
― Kaylee Jaye

“I think it's very dangerous to start censoring what authors should and shouldn't write." I open strong, and this gets some approving murmurs from the crowd. But I still see some skeptical faces, especially from the other Asians present, so I continue. "I'd hate to live in a world where we tell people what they should and shouldn't write based on the color of their skin. I mean, turn what you're saying around and see how it sounds. Can a Black writer not write a novel with a white protagonist? What about everyone who has written about World War Two, and never lived through it? You can critique a work on the grounds of literary quality, and its representations of history—sure. But I see no reason why I shouldn't tackle this subject if I'm willing to do the work. And as you can tell by the text, I did do the work. You can look up my bibliographies. You can do the fact- checking yourself. Meanwhile, I think writing is fundamentally an exercise in empathy. Reading lets us live in someone else's shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller. And as for the question of profit—I mean, should every writer who writes about dark things feel guilty about it? Should creatives not be paid for their work?”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“My family is like America; we are a blend of melanin and uncertain borders.”
― R. YS Perez, I Hope You Fall in Love: Poetry Collection

“I had never said those words because there were no words left. My beloved and I were both exiles from language. Our love couldn't be expressed in words. Our love had been woven into the melodies rendered by his flute, and it was subsumed in the atoms of the air we breathed. It had been consecrated in this shrine. It had never been named. It was an unnamed thing that had remained unspoken, unuttered, unsaid. I did not need to name it when he could already hear it.”
― Faiqa Mansab, This House of Clay and Water

“Proof of concept or POC is the art of winning a ship-building contract by showing the working model of a paper boat”
― Nipun Varma, Adventures of an Indian Techie

“My brownness turns out to be a form of queerness in and of itself and makes me too queer for gay men.”
― Vivek Shraya, I'm Afraid of Men

“If you're not white, you have to be brilliant, just to be considered acceptable.”
― Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit and Other Plays

“One way or another, white people always found a way to fuck a brown woman over.”
― Vivek Shraya, The Subtweet

“I feel ashamed that black people are both the agents and the victims of this chaos, and I don't want to be thought of like that. But I'm also ashamed of myself for thinking I'm somehow better. The shame I feel in my guts, pulsing, spiraling; but also everything feels very far away. I'm black, but my black is different from that of those rioters on TV.”
― Christina Hammonds Reed, The Black Kids

“while white women are an oppressed group, they still wield more power than any other group of women—including the power to oppress both men and women of color.”
― Mikki Kendall , Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

“To him [Papa], the written word could act as an invitation to free thought and the broader world, and nowhere was that more true than in the dawn of the printed word, where — for the first time — that invitation could be made to the masses instead of a select few. (4)”
― The Personal Historian

“...lies...drive immigrants, and people of color...to change who we are in order to make us palatable, or at least tolerable, to white America. I didn't find freedom in assimilation because there is no freedom in racist ideas. Assimilation requires that the story we tell about the United States and about white people is an uplifting, inspiring, sugarcoated version of the facts, in which the whip, guns, and racist motives must remain hidden. But it was the truth about this country, the knowledge of its ugly dirty secrets, that set me free.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“White supremacy is persistent, but so are we.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“The legacy of unions that kept African Americans, Latinos, Chinese, and others out of factory work—redlining, exclusionary immigration policies, the looting of Mexicans' land during the Mexican-American War, deportations of Mexicans during economic downturns—all created a gap that we are still trying to close. In a country where Black Americans have been viewed as 'biologically inferior,' Mexicans as 'an ignorant "hybrid race,"' and Chinese immigrants as the 'ideal human mule,' there is far from a fair chance to access the same economic opportunities as white people.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“We are finally seeing that success doesn't have to happen outside our community or in spite of our heritage. We are rejecting the notion that success is found in whiteness because that kind of thinking has never led us anywhere good. The antidote for the poison of the oppressor is to embrace our brownness, because it is our culture that is propelling us.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“We learn that the United States is the pinnacle of democracy in the world, but how can freedom be made perfect when it was built upon the genocide of Indigenous people, the enslavement of Black people, and the colonization of Mexicans?”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“...my racial identity is a concept that escapes intellectual conversations about race. My personal experiences contradict the idea that Latino is only an ethnicity and not a race. But suggesting that Latino should be a race confounds the situation even more, because we are all so different and experience the world differently, though the same could be said of any other racial group.

When others state, 'Latino is not a race, it's an ethnicity,' they ignore that not all Latinos have the same ethnicity, either. And though we don't all share the same ethnicity, the exact language, religion, customs, culture, food, and so forth, and though we are not the only ethnic group in America, we are the only people who are singled out by our ethnicity.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“We cannot make ourselves or allow others to make us small so we can fit in the minds and hearts of white people. America might never love us back, so we must love ourselves.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“Be yourself. Be over the top. Outlast them. Show them that no amount of fear will ever make you chance who you are.”
― Mark Oshiro, The Insiders