The open letter has always been an interesting rhetorical strategy – a way of delivering a pointed message to a specific individual or group while also reaching a wide audience. Roxane Gay Read Quote
Most open letters undoubtedly come from a good place, rising out of genuine outrage or concern or care. There is, admittedly, also a smugness to most open letters: a sense that we, as the writers of such letters, know better than those to whom the letters are addressed. We will impart our opinions to you, with or without your consent. Roxane Gay Read Quote
It’s an amusing idea to some, this feminism thing – this audacious notion that women should be able to move through the world as freely, and enjoy the same inalienable rights and bodily autonomy, as men. At least, that’s the impression given when feminism and feminists are all too often the targets of lazy humor. Roxane Gay Read Quote
This is the real problem feminism faces. Too many people are willfully ignorant about what the word means and what the movement aims to achieve. Roxane Gay Read Quote
I have never been married. I don’t know if I will ever marry, though I hope to. When I am asked why I have not married, I explain that my parents have been happily married for 42 years. The bar feels so very high for that kind of commitment. Roxane Gay Read Quote
My parents have been married for 42 years. Their marriage has been – from what I can see – a happy one. Roxane Gay Read Quote
We cannot sway extremists with rational thought or with our ideas of right and wrong. Roxane Gay Read Quote
The expansive anarchy of the Internet continues to lull us into believing that, because we can see something, that something should be seen. Because we can say something, there is something that must be said. Roxane Gay Read Quote
That’s what is always fascinating about racism – how it is allowed, if not encouraged, to flourish freely in public spaces, the way racism and bigotry are so often unquestioned. Roxane Gay Read Quote
I can consider not only great art, but the context in which that art has been created. I can consider the people who paid a price for that art to be created and whether or not I want to appreciate that art on their backs. Roxane Gay Read Quote
