Vanessa

“Nothing is forever except change.”
― Liane Moriarty, Nine Perfect Strangers

“People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“But, by the mid-1870s, when the North withdrew its oversight in the face of southern hostility, whites in the South began to resurrect the caste system founded under slavery. Nursing the wounds of defeat and seeking a scapegoat, much like Germany in the years leading up to Nazism, they began to undo the opportunities accorded freed slaves during Reconstruction and to refine the language of white supremacy. They would create a caste system based not on pedigree and title, as in Europe, but solely on race, and which, by law, disallowed any movement of the lowest caste into the mainstream.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration