Allison Gost

“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.*”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“What if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave. What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remain obsessed, even as our bodies move on.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“True horror, you see, comes not from the savagery of the unexpected but from the corruption of everyday objects, spaces. To take a thing we see every day a thing we take for granted as normal, a child’s bedroom and transform it into something sinister untrustworthy is to undermine the very fabric of life.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall