Sarah

“There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own. This is difficult, if only because so much of our myth-making was done in service of liberation, in doing whatever we could to dig our way out of the pit into which we were cast. And above us stand the very people who did the casting, jeering, tossing soil into our eyes and yelling down at us, “You’re doing it wrong.” But we are not them, and the standards of enslavers, colonizers, and villains simply will not do. We require another standard—one that sees the sharpening of our writing as the sharpening of our quality of light. And with that light we are charged with examining the stories we have been told, and how they undergird the politics we have accepted, and then telling new stories ourselves.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Elite networking forums like the Aspen Institute and the Clinton Global Initiative groom the rich to be self-appointed leaders of social change, taking on the problems people like them have been instrumental in creating or sustaining.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“Here is what I think: We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message