Laura

“To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“We never actively remember death,' Odenigbo said. The reason we live as we do is because we do not remember that we will die. We will all die.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“...my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun