"Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside"
About this Quote
“Excavated” is doing the heavy lifting here: Allison doesn’t ask us to “move past” identity categories, as if they’re a bad mood we can outgrow. She frames them as something buried and structural, packed into us by history, family, institutions, and survival strategies. Excavation is slow, messy labor. It implies resistance, discomfort, and the possibility of finding bones, not just tidy self-knowledge.
The insistence on “from the inside” is the tell. Allison’s intent isn’t polite tolerance; it’s internal accountability. Categories like class, race, sexuality, and gender aren’t just labels we impose on strangers. They’re also reflexes we use to explain who deserves what, who feels safe, who gets believed, who can be dismissed without guilt. The subtext is that the real violence of categorization is how effortlessly it becomes moral triage: your story counts less because your body and background have been pre-filed.
Context matters. Allison’s work, shaped by poverty, queer identity, and the brutality of Southern respectability politics, is allergic to the fantasy that oppression is only “out there” in villains. She writes from a place where shame and stigma aren’t abstractions; they are social technologies. That’s why the line refuses the comforting activism of slogans. It points toward an unglamorous project: interrogating the inner archive of assumptions that even well-meaning people carry, including the ways marginalized people can inherit and reproduce the same hierarchies that harm them.
The sentence also slips in a warning: these categories will keep doing their quiet work until we dig them up, name what they’re for, and decide what we’re willing to unlearn.
The insistence on “from the inside” is the tell. Allison’s intent isn’t polite tolerance; it’s internal accountability. Categories like class, race, sexuality, and gender aren’t just labels we impose on strangers. They’re also reflexes we use to explain who deserves what, who feels safe, who gets believed, who can be dismissed without guilt. The subtext is that the real violence of categorization is how effortlessly it becomes moral triage: your story counts less because your body and background have been pre-filed.
Context matters. Allison’s work, shaped by poverty, queer identity, and the brutality of Southern respectability politics, is allergic to the fantasy that oppression is only “out there” in villains. She writes from a place where shame and stigma aren’t abstractions; they are social technologies. That’s why the line refuses the comforting activism of slogans. It points toward an unglamorous project: interrogating the inner archive of assumptions that even well-meaning people carry, including the ways marginalized people can inherit and reproduce the same hierarchies that harm them.
The sentence also slips in a warning: these categories will keep doing their quiet work until we dig them up, name what they’re for, and decide what we’re willing to unlearn.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|
More Quotes by Dorothy
Add to List
