It was one of those negative identities—you imagined yourself in relation to what you didn’t have.
“Everyone has their own path. The choices they've made. How any two people end up in the same place at the same time is a mystery. You get on an elevator with a dozen strangers. You ride a bus, wait in line for the bathroom. It happens every day. To try to predict the places we'll go and the people we'll meet would be pointless.”
― Before the Fall
― 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.”
― Between the World and Me
― 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.”
― Before the Fall
― Before the Fall
“I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.”
― The Crucible
― The Crucible
“You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.”
― Between the World and Me
― Between the World and Me
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