Top 70 Layla F. Saad Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You will also need love for this journey because when the truth telling gets really hard, you will need something more powerful than pain and shame to encourage you to keep going. Pain and shame are neither desirable nor sustainable as long-term strategies for transformational change. It is my hope that love is what initially brought you to this work. It is my conviction that love is what will keep you going.”

— Layla F. Saad

2. “It means you do this work because you believe that every human being deserves dignity, freedom, and equality. It means you do this work because you desire wholeness for yourself and for the world. It means you do this work because you want to become a good ancestor. It means you do this work because love is not a verb to you but an action. It means you do this work because you no longer want to intentionally or unintentionally harm BIPOC.”

— Layla F. Saad

3. “Race-based color blindness is the idea that you do not “see” color. That you do not notice differences in race. Or if you do, that you do not treat people differently or oppress people based on those differences.”

— Layla F. Saad

4. “The aim of this work is truth – seeing it, owning it, and figuring out what to do with it. This is lifelong work. Avoid the shortcuts, and be wary of the easy answers.”

— Layla F. Saad

5. “White supremacy is not just an attitude or a way of thinking. It also extends to how systems and institutions are structured to uphold this white dominance.”

— Layla F. Saad

6. “You cannot dismantle what you cannot see. You cannot challenge what you do not understand.”

— Layla F. Saad

7. “Lastly, cultural appropriation rewrites history with whiteness at the center. So for example, though yoga has its roots in India as a spiritual practice, it is now seen as a predominantly white-centered practice that is focused largely on physical health.”

— Layla F. Saad

8. “You do not have to be the loudest voice. But you do need to use your voice.”

— Layla F. Saad

9. “There is no feel-good reward at the end other than the knowledge that you are doing this because it’s the right thing to do. You will not be congratulated for it. You won’t get any ally cookies for it. You won’t be celebrated for it. You will have to learn to wean yourself off the addiction to instant gratification and instead develop a consciousness for doing what is right even if nobody ever thanks you for it.”

— Layla F. Saad

10. “White supremacy is a system you have been born into. Whether or not you have known it, it is a system that has granted you unearned privileges, protection, and power.”

— Layla F. Saad

11. “But if you are a person who believes in love, justice, integrity, and equity for all people, then you know that this work is nonnegotiable.”

— Layla F. Saad

12. “Tone Policing: A tactic used by those who have white privilege to silence those who do not by focusing on the tone of what is being said rather than the actual content.”

— Layla F. Saad

13. “Science has proven that the concept of race is not a biological fact but rather a social concept.”

— Layla F. Saad

14. “If you are willing to dare to look white supremacy right in the eye and see yourself reflected back, you are going to become better equipped to dismantle it within yourself and within your communities.”

— Layla F. Saad

15. “Here is a radical idea that I would like you to understand: white silence is violence. It actively protects the system. It says I am okay with the way things are because they do not negatively affect me and because I enjoy the benefits I receive with white privilege.”

— Layla F. Saad

16. “This work is not about those white people “out there.” It is about you. Just you.”

— Layla F. Saad

17. “This book is a one-of-a-kind personal antiracism tool structured to help people with white privilege understand and take ownership of their participation in the oppressive system of white supremacy. It is designed to help them take responsibility for dismantling the way that this system manifests, both within themselves and within their communities.”

— Layla F. Saad

18. “People often think that white supremacy is a term that is only used to describe far-right extremists and neo-Nazis. However, this idea that white supremacy only applies to the so-called “bad ones” is both incorrect and dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that white supremacy is an ideology that is only upheld by a fringe group of white people.”

— Layla F. Saad

19. “Your desire to be seen as good can actually prevent you from doing good, because if you do not see yourself as part of the problem, you cannot be part of the solution.”

— Layla F. Saad

20. “The first thing to understand is that allyship is not an identity but a practice. A person with white privilege does not get to proclaim themselves an ally to BIPOC but rather seeks to practice allyship consistently. And a person with white privilege does not get to be the judge of whether what they are practicing actually is allyship, because what they might deem to be allyship could actually be white centering, tokenism, white saviorism, or optical allyship instead.”

— Layla F. Saad

21. “White silence is also a defending of the status quo of white supremacy – a manifestation of holding on to one’s white privilege through inaction.”

— Layla F. Saad

22. “White saviorism is a form of colonialism.”

— Layla F. Saad

23. “Color blindness causes harm at multiple levels. In the first instance, it is an act of minimization and erasure.”

— Layla F. Saad

24. “So for example, though Arab is not synonymous with Muslim, non-Muslim Arabs can experience Islamophobic-type stereotypes because of the media-driven idea that all Muslims are Arab.”

— Layla F. Saad

25. “You are not an exceptional white person, meaning you are not exempt from the conditioning of white supremacy, from the benefits of white privilege, and from the responsibility to keep doing this work for the rest of your life. The moment you begin to think you are exceptional is the moment you begin to relax back into the warm and familiar comfort of white supremacy.”

— Layla F. Saad

26. “This implicit and explicit bias that Fleming draws our attention to exists not just within professional tennis but also in homes, at schools and educational institutions, in businesses, in spiritual spaces, on the internet, and in every space where white supremacy exists.”

— Layla F. Saad

27. “White exceptionalism is the belief that you, as a person holding white privilege, are exempt from the effects, benefits, and conditioning of white supremacy and therefore that the work of antiracism does not really apply to you.”

— Layla F. Saad

28. “White apathy is the choice to stay in the warm and safe comfort of white supremacy and the privileges it affords.”

— Layla F. Saad

29. “Often times, what you describe as cultural appreciation is a form of tokenizing and exoticizing while continuing to discard and dehumanize the actual people of that culture. Often times, the cultural elements that are appropriated are stripped of their original cultural context, meaning, and significance and used in such a way as to serve or pleasure whiteness.”

— Layla F. Saad

30. “Pain and shame are neither desirable nor sustainable as long-term strategies for transformational change. It is my hope that love is what initially brought you to this work. It is my conviction that love is what will keep you going.”

— Layla F. Saad

31. “White feminism is broadly defined as “an epithet used to describe feminist theories that focus on the struggles of white women without addressing distinct forms of oppression faced by ethnic minority women and women lacking other privileges.” 47.”

— Layla F. Saad

32. “Building the racial stamina required to challenge the racist status quo is thus a critical part of our work as white people. Rushing ahead to solutions – especially when we have barely begun to think critically about the problem – bypasses the necessary personal work and reflection and distances us from understanding our own complicity.”

— Layla F. Saad

33. “The enforcement of racist stereotypes in the media and in the collective subconscious is the way in which white supremacy continues to maintain nonwhite people as the “other,” the ones who should be feared, ridiculed, marginalized, criminalized, and dehumanized. Racist stereotypes within white supremacy emphasize again and again that those who are not “like us” are different and therefore a threat.”

— Layla F. Saad

34. “I mean persons who are visually identifiable as white or who pass for white. Therefore, this includes persons who are biracial, multiracial, or white-passing People of Color who benefit under systems of white supremacy from having lighter skin color than visibly Brown, Black, or Indigenous people.”

— Layla F. Saad

35. “A white person’s expression of anger is often seen as righteous, whereas a Black person’s anger is often seen as aggressive and dangerous. Nowhere.”

— Layla F. Saad

36. “It acts as a mirror being held up to you so that you can deeply examine how you have been complicit in a system that has been purposely designed to benefit you through unearned privileges at the expense of BIPOC.”

— Layla F. Saad

37. “Young children understand that the idea of “we don’t see color” does not make sense. They will not necessarily use the socially constructed terms of race that we as adults use, such as Black or white, but when asked to describe what color they are and what color their friends are, they use words such as brown and peach that match up with the colors in their Crayola crayon boxes. When.”

— Layla F. Saad

38. “Today, notice how color blindness shifts the burden of addressing the consequences of racism onto BIPOC by asking them to stop talking about racism and just work harder and be more like white people.”

— Layla F. Saad

39. “White exceptionalism has shown up every time you saw one of the reflective journaling questions and thought, I don’t do that or That doesn’t apply to me. I have never or would never think that.”

— Layla F. Saad

40. “You can be an introvert and have powerful conversations. You can be an introvert and use writing to disrupt white supremacy. You can be an introvert and show up to protest marches. You do not have to be the loudest voice. But you do need to use your voice.”

— Layla F. Saad

41. “White supremacy is far from fringe. In white-centered societies and communities, it is the dominant paradigm that forms the foundation from which norms, rules, and laws are created.”

— Layla F. Saad

42. “Remember, white supremacy is not just about individual acts of racism, but rather it is a system of oppression that seeps into and often forms the foundation of many of the regular spaces where you spend your time – school, work, spiritual spaces, health and wellness spaces, and so on.”

— Layla F. Saad

43. “Racist stereotypes continue to abound in the media and in people’s minds, causing marginalization, loss of opportunities, erasure, suspicion, and ridicule.”

— Layla F. Saad

44. “Feeling the feelings – which are an appropriate human response to racism and oppression – is an important part of the process. When you allow yourself to feel those feelings, you wake up. You rehumanize yourself. You start to realize that you weren’t feeling these feelings before because you had shut down a part of your humanity in order to participate in white supremacy. White supremacy purposely numbs you to the pain that your racism causes.”

— Layla F. Saad

45. “Here’s to doing what is right and not what is easy.”

— Layla F. Saad

46. “The reality is that you have been conditioned since you were a child to believe in white superiority through the way your history was taught, through the way race was talked about, and through the way students of color were treated differently from you. You have been educated by institutions that have taught white superiority through curricula that favor a white-biased narrative, through the lack of representation of BIPOC, and through the way these institutions handled acts of racism.”

— Layla F. Saad

47. “If your understanding of racism and white supremacy does not include a historical and modern-day contextual understanding of colonization, oppression, discrimination, neglect, and marginalization at the systemic level and not just the individual level, then you are going to struggle when it comes to conversations about race.”

— Layla F. Saad

48. “White exceptionalism is the belief that because you have read antiracism books and articles, listened to social justice–based podcasts, watched documentaries on the effects of racism, and follow some BIPOC activists and teachers, you know it all and do not need to dig deeper.”

— Layla F. Saad

49. “For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a constant drip. Every look, every comment, every bad call blossoms out of history, through her, onto you.”9.”

— Layla F. Saad

50. “When you insist that you will not believe or give credibility or attention to BIPOC until they speak in a tone that suits you, then you uphold the idea that your standards as a white person are more superior.”

— Layla F. Saad