Bethany Elizabeth

“History is never dead. It crawls its way into our present and shapes our future.”
― J.U. Scribe, Roman Identity

“Black Brits emigrated into a society with an already established white underclass and were mostly dumped in areas where that underclass already lived; black Americans and the indigenous peoples were the foundation of the US underclass.”
― Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

“And so “white damsel” as an archetype was one of racial purity, Christian morality, sexual innocence, demureness, and financial dependence on men all rolled into one. A privilege, yes, but a perilous one, for to step off this pedestal meant no longer being regarded as a “woman.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“In the comfortingly distorted view of the past, American slavery came about in the passive sense. That's just the way things were back then. Slavery was an inherited reality, a long-standing if unsavory fact of trade and war. In reality, colonial legislatures consciously conceived American chattel slavery at the turn of the eighteenth century, and they spelled out its terms in painstaking regulatory detail. Virginia's slave codes contained forty-one sections and more than four thousand words.

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The slave codes of 1705 are among American history's most striking evidence that our nation's greatest sins were achieved with clear forethought and determined maintenance.”
― Kai Wright, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019