Lex

“Across the United States, there are more than seventeen hundred monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a breakaway republic whose constitution and leaders were unequivocal in declaring the purpose of their new nation. "Its foundations are laid," "its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth... With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye by nature, or by curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“I am The Black Book.
Between my top and my bottom, my right and my
left, I hold what I have seen, what I have done, and what I have thought.
I am everything I have hated: labor without harvest; death without honor;
life without land or law. I am a black woman holding a white child in her
arms singing to her own baby lying unattended in the grass.

I am all the ways I have failed:
I am the black slave owner, the buyer of
Golden Peacock Bleach Crème and Dr. Palmer’s Skin Whitener, the self-
hating player of the dozens; I am my own nigger joke.

I am all the ways I survived:
I am tun-mush, hoecake cooked on a hoe; I am
Fourteen black jockeys winning the Kentucky Derby. I am the creator of
hundreds of patented inventions; I am Lafitte the pirate and Marie Laveau.
I am Bessie Smith winning a roller-skating contest; I am quilts and ironwork,
fine carpentry and lace. I am the wars I fought, the gold I mined,
The horses I broke, the trails I blazed.

I am all the things I have seen:
The New York Caucasian newspaper, the
scarred back of Gordon the slave, the Draft Riots, darky tunes, and mer-
chants distorting my face to sell thread, soap, shoe polish coconut.

And I am all the things
I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in
silent water, dream books and number playing. I am the sound of my own
voice singing “Sangaree.” I am ring-shouts, and blues, ragtime and gospels. I am
mojo, voodoo, and gold earrings.

I am not complete here; there is much more,
but there is no more time and no more space . . . and I have journeys to take,
ships to name, and crews.”
― Middleton A. Harris, The Black Book

“Should a parent clip them a little at a time, spread it out to spare them the pain of a single blow? Should a parent sit them down and get it over with? You could argue that the sooner a child knows, the safer, more prepared he will be. Maybe a parent should hold off as long as he can, give his child the longest possible chance to... a child. He'll have the rest of his life, decades, to live with the reality, adjust himself to the truth.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Human history is rife with examples of inconceivable violence, and as Americans, we like to think of our country as being far beyond the guillotines of medieval Europe or the reign of the Huns. And yet it was here that "Native Americans were occasionally skinned and made into bridle reins," wrote the scholar Charles Mills. Andrew Jackson, the U.S. president who oversaw the forced removal of indigenous people from their ancestral homelands during the Trails of Tears, used bridle reins of indigenous flesh when he went horseback riding. And it was here that, into the 20th century, African-Americans were burned alive at the stake, as 17 year old Jesse Washington was in Waco, Texas, in 1916 before a crowd of thousands.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents