Larissa

“School was going better for me than I had ever hoped. For the first time in my life, I began to know, really know, I was smart—smart as defined by being able to do the white man’s work, being able to study.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“Whiteness, she believed, was not only color, because some people had olive undertones, like the swarthy Greeks and Italians she’d seen working for Logan’s family in Birmingham. It wasn’t just class, because admittedly some of them were poorer than the colored folk on the side of the tracks. It was more affectation and flair. An attitude of ownership. That you were owed shit. The world. The day. The night. The people. The bodies. The labor. And, of course, the money. If you could have the audacity to believe yourself appointed above all, delude yourself into believing that you were victim, yet posed as the victor while still demanding more tokens and tributes to affirm and establish the position you created for yourself, were you not white? After all she’d done, was she not white?”
― Nikesha Elise Williams, The Seven Daughters of Dupree

“Losing children, three snuffed out before they could even be considered, was a kind of pain Emma wore every day. She knew it well. She had gotten used to the cold spot in the bed; it had been there ever since Jeremiah. In life she learned that all you love you lose. Everything ends up on the other side.”
― Nikesha Elise Williams, The Seven Daughters of Dupree

“A war between the races would help nobody and free nobody and should be avoided at all costs. But a one-sided race war with Black people as the targets and white people shooting the guns is worse. We will be criminally negligent, however, if we do not deal with racism and racist violence, and if we do not prepare to defend ourselves against it”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography