Caleb Logan

“I began to run across Lenox Avenue, toward Adam Clayton Powell, and was almost hit by a speeding cab. The driver screeched to a halt and rolled down his window. He grinned and extended his hand. “We did it!” he said, “I don’t know how, but we did it!”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“NOT ALL VIOLENCE is hot. There’s cold violence, too, which takes its time and finally gets its way. Children going to school and coming home are exposed to it. Fathers and mothers listen to politicians on television calling for their extermination. Grandmothers have no expectation that even their aged bodies are safe: any young man may lay a hand on them with no consequence. The police could arrive at night and drag a family out into the street. Putting a people into deep uncertainty about the fundamentals of life, over years and decades, is a form of cold violence.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“But sometime, a negro get tired of white man stomping so he grab the foot, twist and break it. Sometime a negro say, Enough done be enough now.”
― Marlon James, The Book of Night Women

“They knew, on a gut level, that it wasn’t the white and black dichotomy that was being challenged, but the idea that to be American is to be white or black. Who knew what could follow on from this murky Kenyan-Indonesian-Hawaiian-Kansan mélange? They were right to be frantic. Obama had challenged the assumption that a person had to be from somewhere familiar, had to be from one place, and he had successfully smuggled that question into the center of American life.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays