Sarah

“In overly mythologizing our ancestors, we forget an all-too-important reality: the vast majority were ordinary people, which is to say they were people just like everyone else. This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legitimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“I realize I don't know very much. None of us knows very much. But we can all learn more. Then we can teach one another. We can stop denying reality or hoping it will go away by magic.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“You don’t have to have a reason to be tired. You don’t have to earn rest or comfort. You’re allowed to just be.”
― Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

“Every time I returned home I would drive on streets named for those who thought of me as chattel. “Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee.” “Take a left on Jefferson Davis.” “Make the first right on Claiborne.” Translation: “Go straight for two miles on the general whose troops slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender.” “Take a left on the president of the Confederacy, who understood the torture of Black bodies as the cornerstone of their new nation.” “Make the first right on the man who allowed the heads of rebelling slaves to be mounted on stakes in order to prevent other slaves from getting any ideas.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America