Vanessa

“To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative - to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception - is worse.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know

“All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“of unresolved grief, large and small, of others assuming that he, beautiful Black person in gorgeous Black body, was born violent and dangerous; this assumption, impossible to hide, manifesting in every word and glance and action, and every word and glance and action ingested and internalized, and it’s unfair and unjust, this sort of death”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“I don’t think white people identify themselves as white Americans. They think their perspective is objective. They don’t realize they’re always invested in the advancement of white people.”
― Claudia Rankine, The White Card: A Play