Martha☀

“There was one question that the judge and the prosecutors and the defense never asked the jurors but that was central to the proceedings: Would a jury of twelve white men ever punish another white man for killing an American Indian? One skeptical reporter noted, “The attitude of a pioneer cattleman toward the full-blood Indian…is fairly well recognized.” A prominent member of the Osage tribe put the matter more bluntly: “It is a question in my mind whether this jury is considering a murder case or not. The question for them to decide is whether a white man killing an Osage is murder—or merely cruelty to animals.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“When it comes to social justice, the role of the white ally is not to be a savior or a fixer. Instead, the role of the ally is to find other white people and talk to make them see that many of the benefits they’ve enjoyed in life are direct results of the fact that someone else did not have the same benefits.”
― Jodi Picoult, Small Great Things

“Fiction harmless? Look at religion. Fiction harmless? Look at the oppressed masses content with their lot because they have embraced the lies imposed on them. History itself is just a fiction-a fiction with an army. And reality? Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget. That's what it is. And how is reality funded? With yet another fiction: money. Money is at the core of it all. An illusion we've all agreed to support. Unanimously. We can differ on other matters, like creed or political affiliations, but we all agree on the fiction of money and that this abstraction represents concrete goods. Any goods. Look it up. It's all in Marx. Money, he says, is not one thing. It is, potentially, all things. And for this reason it is unrelated to all things.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitability undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgement, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room