Teresa

“I have lived my whole life as a Black man in the United States. I don't have to go all the way back to Tulsa and Rosewood and Emmett Till to know what it means for a white woman to accuse a Black man, and who would likely be believed. This was potentially a world of trouble heading my way. Her fingers were already dialing; in a split second of self-preservation, I considered that if I just stopped recording, maybe this would go away.
Which of course was her intent. I can't say whether it was a conscious choice or the product of unconscious bias when she grabbed that bloody, blunt object, of the White Damsel in Distress Threatened by the Black Menace, to try to club me into compliance with her wish not to be recorded; I don't know her at all, can't know why it was so easily within her reach, when she was grasping for something to give her leverage in our confrontation. In the weeks that followed, several right-wing mouthpieces would seek to excuse it, justifying her injection of race into the situation as merely her giving a full and accurate physical description of me to the police. (Never mind the falseness of the accusation in the first place.) Except at that moment, she wasn't speaking to the police; she was talking to me. People who think their life is in danger don't pause to inform their supposed assailant, in a rather triumphal tone of voice, that they're about to call the cops and inform them of your race; if they're genuinely scared for their life, they punch the digits, period. Her intent, in saying it to me, was to use the long history of Fear the Black Man, and the resulting unjust police violence against us, to intimidate me into submission.”
― Christian Cooper, Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World

“Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation. Thousands of Peace Corps volunteers are making a difference in the isolated villages and city slums of dozens of countries. Thousands of unknown men and women in Europe resisted the occupation of the Nazis and many died, but all added to the ultimate strength and freedom of their countries. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage such as these that human history is thus shaped.
(Page 281)”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

“Writing a memoir is akin to taking off one's clothes in public, and as I learned years ago in the amateur strip contest as Darren and the go-go boys cheered me on, success at such an endeavor can only happen when you've got a lot of people pulling for you.”
― Christian Cooper, Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World

“personage was formally identified upon entrance: Acclaimed eighty-seven-year-old poet Robert Frost; father of antibiotics Selman Waksman; literature Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck; astronaut John Glenn; immunologist Thomas Weller, whose virus research enabled the polio vaccine; J. Robert Oppenheimer, Manhattan Project director; celebrated novelists James Baldwin and William Styron—in all, a parade of 127 guests and their spouses.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s