Jin Z

“Even the apparently unreliable narrator is more often than not reliably unreliable. Think of Kazuo Ishiguro’s butler in The Remains of the Day, or of Bertie Wooster, or even of Humbert Humbert. We know that the narrator is being unreliable because the author is alerting us, through reliable manipulation, to that narrator’s unreliability. A process of authorial flagging is going on; the novel teaches us how to read its narrator. Unreliably”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

“During his first year in office, Congress did just that, passing legislation that changed the formulas governing eligibility and payouts for certain means-tested entitlements.7 These changes led to a roughly 2 percent increase in the poverty rate, the brunt of which was borne by African Americans.”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“As the historian David Krugler explains, “African Americans were not so much rioting as fighting back, counterattacking, repelling violence; above all, resisting.”79”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“Keeping blacks subjugated required that they be unarmed. Alabama’s law was typical: “Any freedman, mulatto, or free person of color in this state” was forbidden “to own fire-arms, or carry about his person a pistol or other deadly weapon.”76 Blacks caught breaking the law were subject to incarceration—which, in the early twentieth century, often meant being sold into debt servitude and forced to work in conditions that approximated slavery. According to Douglas Blackmon, “In an era when great numbers of southern men carried sidearms, the crime of carrying a concealed weapon—enforced almost solely against black men—would by the turn of the century become one of the most consistent instruments of black incarceration.”77”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America