More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Now the chain was breaking. The strongest link was already gone. Her name was Dasani.
chapter 1
Dasani family, siblings, location.
begins at the dawn of the twenty-first century, in a global financial capital riven by inequality.
Larger context
Her siblings are her greatest solace; their separation, her greatest fear.
forces beyond her control—hunger, violence, racism, homelessness, parental drug addiction,
pollution, segregated...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
If the Success Academy comes to McKinney, its students will enter through different doors, eat their meals apart, and wear nicer uniforms.
one with a reliable email account or at least a cellphone that doesn’t shut off. None of these conditions exist for Dasani.
She asks her students to write their own obituary. When given the option of choosing their lifespan, most of them aim for seventy.
None of the siblings will venture into the bathroom after dark. This is why they relieve themselves in what Dasani calls “the piss bucket.”
She had them by design, planning for this small army of siblings,
She is acting tough because she can no longer dress fly.
White people divide into two categories: those who are paid to monitor Dasani’s family, and those who are called to help.
These theatrics are something of a decoy. They distract from Chanel’s most vulnerable parts,
Supreme and Chanel have been scolded about their lack of financial discipline in countless meetings
depth of Dasani’s troubles and the height of her promise.
Her mood is lifting. She is back in the mode of spectator, forgetting her own troubles as she turns to her surroundings.
The colony’s enslaved population swelled to 13,500, making it the largest slaveholding territory in the North.
2012, more than 3 million New Yorkers (roughly 38 percent of the city’s population) are getting Medicaid,
43,000 beds to homeless people every night.
ACS will remove 4,072 children from their homes, placing them in a foster care system with more than 13,000 children—the vast majority of them Black or Latino.
the social worker goes out on a limb. “I beat my kids,” says Miss Moya. “I have no problem saying that.
Dasani’s belief that she and her siblings are the cause of her mother’s ruin. It never occurs to her that for Chanel, the children represent her only accomplishment.
Robert Moses, had another vision: He wanted to transform Brooklyn into a cultural and civic hub,
Moses had little regard for the poor and a particular loathing for Black people, whom he considered “inherently ‘dirty,’
Langston Hughes’s poem, “Will V-Day Be Me-Day Too?”: When I take off my uniform,
Will I be safe from harm— Or will you do me As the Germans did the Jews?
“There was a Buffalo Soldier, in the heart of America,” Dasani sang along, bopping her head. “Fighting on arrival. Fighting for survival.”
Labor unions tended to exclude Black workers.
Poverty by America insight.
“A riot,” in King’s words, “is the language of the unheard.”
