Brady Seignious’s Reviews > How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America > Status Update

“ in 1863, when the emancipation proclamation was signed, black Americans owned about .5% of the total wealth in the United States. Today, despite being 13% of the population, Black people own less than 4% of the nations wealth despite the role black Americans played in generating this country’s wealth, they don’t have access to the vast majority of it.”

A young boy sent to the electric chair for a crime a didn’t commit… only to survive and then a year later be put to death by electrocution…

“If in Germany today, there were prison built on top of a former concentration, camp, and that prison disproportionally incarcerated Jewish people, it would rightly provoke outrage throughout the world. I imagine there would be international summits on closing such an egregious institution. And yet in the United States, such a collective outrage at this plantation turned prison is relatively muted.”

“John believes that it is not enough for people to write about slave free from the towers of academia if so, many of those works never reach a wide audience. He thinks the Whitney offers something different, something more dynamic. “I’ve seen some of the greatest imperial studies, and they sit on library shelves gathering dust. Nobody reads them. We want to go to the masses, man we want to go to the mass.”

…”And all of a sudden, you feel very strange. It’s not a feeling of guilt. It’s a feeling of discovered ignorance. I don’t know how else to explain it. When you wonder, how could this have happened and I didn’t know about it? How could that happen?”

The sugar industry, is a result of slavery. It is capitalism. Slavery meant rape for the slave.

This might be a first 5/5 stars book I’ve read in a while.