Anatole

“Over the next twelve years, I came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history. He was phenomenal—the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen. He had an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“I said, “Los Angeles burned but Los Angeles is but one city experiencing this kind of hopelessness and despair,” I said, “and we need a job program with stipends …” I said, “These young people really, ya know, are not in anybody’s statistics or data. They’ve been dropped off of everybody’s agenda. They live from grandmama to mama to girlfriend.” I said, “We now got young people who are twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two years old who have never worked a day of their lives.” I said, “These are the young people in our streets and they are angry and they are frustrated.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

“The clown isn’t an actor or character. The clown is a person representing all of us in one way or another, representing our imperfections and who we are, with the grand desire of creating a universal “us.”
― Ezra LeBank, Clowns: In conversation with modern masters

“I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.”
― Tara Westover, Educated