This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure to learn more.
A belated ode to Equal Pay Day.
There’s a statistic that women are making 79 cents to the male dollar, but there’s a hidden factor, which is that when we speak about this, we are specifically referring to white women and white men. What is hidden is the fact that a black woman makes 63 cents to the dollar, a native American woman makes 57 cents to the dollar and a Hispanic woman makes 54 cents to the dollar. What we don’t talk about (never talk about?) is race.
In honor of Equal Pay Day, a few of my favorite quotes from my most recent read, Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult
“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are. —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN”
“Active racism is telling a nurse supervisor that an African American nurse can’t touch your baby. It’s snickering at a black joke. But passive racism? It’s noticing there’s only one person of color in your office and not asking your boss why. It’s reading your kid’s fourth-grade curriculum and seeing that the only black history covered is slavery, and not questioning why. It’s defending a woman in court whose indictment directly resulted from her race…and glossing over that fact, like it hardly matters.”
“You say you don’t see color…but that’s all you see. You’re so hyperaware of it, and of trying to look like you aren’t prejudiced, you can’t even understand that when you say race doesn’t matter all I hear is you dismissing what I’ve felt, what I’ve lived, what it’s like to be put down because of the color of my skin.”
“True confession: The reason we don’t talk about race is because we do not speak a common language.”
And more.
I cannot recommend this book enough. There are very few books that hit me hard, but this was definitely one of them.
Currently Reading:
– Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
