🌹’s Reviews > We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival > Status Update

Do oppressed people have an irresistible impulse to forgive? Does forgiveness free us from some larger burden, enabling us to cope with the daily struggle?….It’s a form of masochism, kissing the sword that has just sliced you open.

[Black people] could not sleep, eat, learn, or walk according to their own desires.

‘If he should Runaway, he must wear a Pothook about his neck, and if that won’t bring him under, he must wear Iron spaneals upon his Legs till you are pretty sure he will be orderly; for as he is my slave he must and shall be obedient, but if he be orderly use him kindly.’
- Joseph Ball, Colonial Planter

“To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.”
- James Baldwin, Times magazine

…I find myself thinking of John Berger. “The relation between what we SEE and what we KNOW is never settled,” he wrote. “Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”

…envision black bodies moving through time unhindered by desperate talk of bell curves, crime genes, fast-twitch muscle fibers, and cultures of poverty. In such visions, I seek shelter from a white majority apparently inclined to limit us to a few options: glued to a slide like a lab specimen, working tirelessly on its behalf, comforting it with entertainment, caged up, silenced, or absent.

The idea that African Americans can commit a crime simply by existing is more than just a deeply entrenched racist misconception; it is also an idea rooted in capitalism’s need for a cheap, exploitable labor force…

The slaveholders’ fear of drums bordered on superstition. They believed them capable of stirring up frenzy so contagious and fast-spreading that it was nearly impossible to resist.

…British writer Hilary Mantel: “Oppressors don’t just want to do their deed,” she wrote, “they want to take a bow: they want their victims to sing their praises.”