Matt Scholes

“Banks remain twice as likely to offer loans to White entrepreneurs than to Black entrepreneurs. Customers avoid Black businesses like they are the “ghetto,” like the “White man’s ice is colder,” as antiracists have joked for years. I knew this then. But my dueling consciousness still led me to think like one young Black writer wrote in Blavity in 2017: “On an intellectual level, I know that Black people have been denied equal access to capital, training, and physical space. But does that inequitable treatment excuse bad service?” Does not good service, like every other commodity, typically cost more money? How can we acknowledge the clouds of racism over Black spaces and be shocked when it rains on our heads? I felt Black was beautiful, but Black spaces were not? Nearly everything I am I owe to Black space. Black neighborhood. Black church. Black college. Black studies. I was like a plant devaluing the soil that made me.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Yes, that was it; it produced what seemed like a subtraction of noise, because one was used to sound accompanying weather; wind sighed or roared, rain drummed or hissed or—if it was mist and too light to produce noise directly—at least created drips and glugs. But snow falling with no wind to accompany it seemed to defy nature; it was like watching a screen with the sound off, it was like being deaf. That was it.”
― Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

“The most insidious part of fame for April wasn’t that other people dehumanized her; it was that she dehumanized herself. She came to see herself not as a person but as a tool. And if that tool wasn’t being used, sharpened, refined, or strengthened at every opportunity, then she was letting the world down. April was a person, but we all convinced her that she was both more and less than that.”
― Hank Green, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

“makes his covenant known to them.”
― Philip F Reinders, Seeking God's Face: Praying with the Bible Through the Year