Attack of the Black Rectangles

by Amy Sarig King

We do a lot wrong. For starters, we don’t talk about how 73 percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves.

Loud grace looks like attending protests and writing letters to the president about veterans’ benefits and civil rights.

when you pretend a thing didn’t happen, that means it can happen again.

What occurs to me right then is that my feelings about this scene are horror, sadness, and shock, but because she made the scene about her own censorship rather than the content of the book, I feel distant because I was more curious about the black rectangle than I was paying attention to the book. It makes me even more determined to fight the whole thing.

“Crying is a natural reaction to disappointment. Would you tell me not to sneeze?”

“We’re all a mess,” he repeats. “The biggest lie ever told to children is that the adults around them aren’t a mess.”