Reese

“Sometimes people don’t change for the better,” he said. “We say to ourselves, there’s a chance they will get better. But there’s a chance they won’t. That’s the alternate story nobody wants to see.”
― Dawn Turner, Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood

“I think about the parable of the little girl and the starfish told to me by a grandparent, though I can’t remember which. A young girl walks along a beach on which thousands of starfish have washed up during a terrible storm. She begins picking up the starfish, one by one, and throwing them back into the sea. An old man walks down to the beach and asks the young girl, “Why are you doing this? Look at how many starfish there are. You cannot possibly begin to make a difference.” The girl pays the man no mind and picks up another starfish and throws it back into the waves. Then she says to the old man, “It made a difference to that one.”
― Isaac Fitzgerald, Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional

“The most widely accepted measure for calculating income inequality is a century-old formula called the Gini coefficient. It’s a gold standard for economists around the globe, along with the World Bank, the CIA, and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. What it reveals is startling. Today the United States has the most unequal society of all developed nations. America’s level of inequality is comparable to that of Russia, China, Argentina, and the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“Brook’s mother, Taneeta Bacon, spoke frankly to us. “When I left Georgia in 1989, I left looking for something else. But Georgia is everywhere. The same problems are everywhere. There is no promised land.” With that, she walked off. She had framed the march: it was a march about a death, and it was a walk about all that had been taken from Black Americans.”
― Louise Story, Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap – From Tulsa's Black Wall Street to Greenwood Banking and Racial Justice