Jerald Walker > Quotes

“...if, like me, you enjoyed driving white liberals up the wall. And the surest way to do that, if you were black, was to deny them the chance to pity you.”
― Jerald Walker, How to Make a Slave and Other Essays

“Less time needs to be spent on the dragons,' he told me once, 'and more on our ability to forge swords for battle, and the skill with which we've used them.”
― Jerald Walker, How to Make a Slave and Other Essays

“Because suddenly what I wanted more than anything for my children was what he had wanted for his - identities formed from within - for our mirrors, in other words, to first and foremost reflect humans.”
― Jerald Walker, Magically Black and Other Essays

“Brenda and I had busted our derrieres to raise our sons in a community where it was safe for them to walk its streets at night, which, by dint of their blackness, meant it was not safe for them to walk its streets at night.”
― Jerald Walker, Magically Black and Other Essays

“When God decides to punish you for wrongdoing, his aim is sure, and there’s nothing you can do but accept the blow.”
― Jerald Walker, The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult

“I pictured myself wandering around in the middle of the night, fearing no one, and being oblivious to causing fear...What does it feel like, I wondered, for a Black man to experience such a thing? Freedom? Bliss? Nothing at all? I do not know. I simply, for the life of me, cannot imagine it. Though Lord knows I've tried.”
― Jerald Walker, Magically Black and Other Essays