Chip Howell

“Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. It was for fear of being beaten to this beat that black soldiers avoided the Saigon bars where their white comrades kept the jukeboxes humming with Hank Williams and his kind, sonic signposts that said, in essence, No Niggers.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“If you voted for a man who said "Grab em by the pussy," you have zero room to claim to protect anyone in bathrooms.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“You do not need an identity to become yourself; you need an identity to become -like- someone else.”
― Samuel R. Delany

“And he realized with an abrupt sense shock that he had been giving more and more reliance to prescient memory and it had weakened him for this particular emergency.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune