Bj

“My whole life people have wondered "what" I am, what race or nationality. ... It's happened again and again: someone looking at me furtively, or calling me "exotic" and asking me "What's your heritage?" Once when I was making a purchase in a department store, the white salesman behind the counter was too nervous or too polite to ask--most likely not wanting to offend a white woman by assuming that she was anything but white. He needed to write on the back of my check the additional identifying information required back then: race and gender. Hesitating, his pen hovering, he tried to look at me without my notice. I watched his face as he deliberated after a second and third glance at my features, my straight, fine hair, my skin color and clothing. He must have considered, too, how I had spoken and whether any of those factors matched his notions of certain people--black people. I stood there and said nothing as he scribbled the letters WF, the designation for white female. In the same week, with a different clerk, I had been given the designation BF. That time I had not been alone: I had been standing in line at the grocery store with a friend who is black.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“I wasn't aware that words could hold so much. I didn't know a sentence could be so full.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“During the bloodiest war in American history, Lee and his comrades killed more U.S. Army soldiers than any other enemy, ever. And they did it for the worst reason possible: to create a nation dedicated to exploit enslaved men, women, and children, forever.”
― Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

“If he didn’t do it,” McDowell said, “how did he know what time to lie about not being there?”
― Valerie Bauerlein, The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty