placidcrow

“Now there are troops at the border,” I said, “and shootings of black and brown and Jewish people.”

Taylor nodded. He contemplated the meaning of that. “So the real question would be,” he said finally, “if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”

We let that settle in the air, neither of us willing to hazard a guess to that one.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something and not care how they get it.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Once upon a time something happened that you never could have imagined, a spell was broken, a girl was saved, a rose grew out of a tooth buried deep in the ground, love was everywhere, and people who had been taken away continued to walk with you, in dreams and in the waking world.”
― Alice Hoffman, The World That We Knew

“A few years ago, a Nigerian-born playwright came to a talk that I gave at the British Library in London. She was intrigued by the lecture, the idea that 6 million African-Americans had had to seek political asylum within the borders of their own country during the Great Migration, a history that she had not known of. She talked with me afterward and said something that I have never forgotten, that startled me in its simplicity. “You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents