Rachel

“You’re not a problem, Misery. You’re a privilege.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Bride

“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

“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

“I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America