Amarachi

“We felt helpless, and yet this wasn't linked to the growing inequality and social isolation of the 1980s postwelfare state. The aggressive backlash to the gains of feminism and the civil rights movements of the sixties. We needed help and felt shame for asking. We had failed in some sense of an American individualist imperative. We had an obligation to recover. The narrative of progression. This was not only for the medical-pharmaceutical establishment which required our before and after stories, but also for a culture that locates mental illness in the self and not the society. If it doesn't quite work this way, there was no acknowledgment of that. There weren't stories of the ones who don't recover, or get better and worse over and over again.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen

“In fact, it is the whole reason race was invented. Africans had to either be excised from humanity or cast into the lower reaches to justify their exploitation.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“She'd had her own childhood of moments just like this. She too had parents who were over-educated and underpaid - it was the worst combination. They had raised her and her sister in a ghetto of artists and poets, guaranteeing that they would be alienated from rich children and poor children alike, thanks to a cultural and political vocabulary that suggest class and privilege without actual class and privilege - gauche caviar without the actual caviar.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message