Rachel

“Maybe this is what we speak of when we talk about nostalgia. A longing not for a thing or a place but for a version of ourselves that is now gone, something that slipped through our fingers, piece by piece, day after day after day, without our realizing it.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“Slavery’s an institution. In Jefferson’s lifetime it becomes a system. So what is this slave system? It is a system of exploitation, a system of inequality and exclusion, a system where people are owned as property and held down by physical and psychological force, a system being justified even by people who know slavery is morally wrong. By doing what? Denying the very humanity of those who are enslaved solely on the basis of the color of their skin.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“He took a step closer, close enough I could kiss him, if I dared. "Nothing to do with you?" he whispered, incredulous. "I remember how you taste, Lemon, the sound of your breath as I held you." I felt my skin getting hot even as I pressed a water bottle to the side of my neck and looked away. "I remember the way you counted the tattoos on my skin, the shape of your mouth, the way your body felt when you came for me," he muttered, gliding his fingertips across my furiously red cheeks. "And I still fucking love the way you blush. It drives me crazy.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip