Karena Bakas

“Don't matter if you was or wasn't. All they gotta so is say you was. That's all they gotta do. You think cuz you all big and muscled up, you safe? Naw, dem white folks can't stand the sight of you. Walkin' round free as can be. Don't nobody want to see a black man look like you walkin' proud as a peacock. Like you ain't got a lick of fear in you”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“a ring of jailhouse informants-- or 'snitches'--... allegedly received lenient sentences as well as food, drugs, sex and special privileges from detectives... It's not difficult to imahine why a prisoner-informant would lie about overhearing a confession when it means real material benefits... [and] prosecutors are often motivated to make those informants sound believable to a judge. Testimony from a single jailhouse informant is enough to convict a person for a charge as serious as murder... [Snitch] testimony [is] the leading cause of wrongful convictions in US capital cases."
-- Aaron Miguel Cantu”
― Maya Schenwar, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States

“Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s “normal” state, and occasions a radical intimacy with—and radical alienation from—one’s body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity? Or is this just another disqualification of anything tied too closely to the female animal from the privileged term (in this case, nonconformity, or radicality)?”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“You’ve got two scientists and an engineer and a nun and a lawyer and a banker and a cop and an artist. That’s not a defence force, that’s a cop and six different kinds of nerd.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth