Adrienne > Adrienne's Quotes

“A good quit feels powerful. Deciding what you won’t have in your life is as important as deciding what you will have. Trying out something you expect to love, realizing you don’t really love it, and giving it back, that takes guts.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“It takes courage to quit something, but often you get that courage back with dividends.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“But maybe the trick isn't sticking everything out. The trick is quitting the right thing at the right time. The trick is understanding that saying "No, thank you" to something you're expected to accept isn't failure. It's a whole other level of success.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“essential desire for equity and the ability to live freely without the fear of white terrorism literally trumps everything, as former first lady Michelle Obama expresses in Becoming.”
― Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation

“Senator Bernie Sanders, who was the hope of so many, considering Democratic losses after the 2018 midterm elections, remarked, “There are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist who felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American.” How is not voting for someone simply because they’re black not racist?”
― Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation

“But I still have questions, and the way to get answers is to bear her corrections.”
― Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation

“Just 2 percent of the world’s population and 5 percent of white people in the U.S. have blond hair, but 35 percent of female U.S. senators and 48 percent of female CEOs at S&P 500 companies are”
― Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation

“I suppose if all I had to do was bleach my hair blond to stop white supremacists from wanting to burn crosses in my yard, I might consider blondness myself. Certainly, the forty-fifth president and his family understand the importance of the blond signifier in their campaign to Make America Great Again.”
― Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation

“Those who voted in 2016 to be represented yet again by this form of violence, the 62 percent of white men and 47 percent of white women, a plurality, how am I to understand them?”
― Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation

“this nation is both its credits and debits.”
― Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation

“American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt…. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”
― Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation

“People like Ruby Sales, who remains committed to engaging what she names “the culture of whiteness,” always have my undying respect. In 1965, when a white man, Jonathan Daniels, knocked her down thus taking a shotgun blast meant for her, fired by another white man, Tom Coleman, she says she stood between the best and the worst our democracy has to offer. The murkiness as we exist alongside each other calls us forward. I don’t want to forget that I am here; at any given moment we are, each of us, next to any other capable of both the best and the worst our democracy has to offer.”
― Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation

“The initial aim of Georgia’s founder, James Edward Oglethorpe, and the colony’s twenty trustees was to create an Eden in which England’s “downtrodden” would find opportunity to become sturdy yeoman, growing grapes for wine and mulberry trees for silk. In 1732, sensing in advance these would bring Georgia to grief, Oglethorpe convinced Parliament to outlaw liquor, slaves, large plantations, lawyers, and Catholics.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“They waited impatiently in the northeastern counties, already cleared of troublesome “savages,” until most of the Muscogee and Cherokee bands along the Alabama border were driven out or murdered and they could claim their 404 1/2-acre plots, which they had already won in lotteries.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“masters did something else to bind poor and rich whites together. Working with women, they created the Lost Cause movement, designed to glorify the antebellum South and the Confederate cause, honor the war dead, and provide poor and middling whites with a sense of aristocratic belonging.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“Each year Hamilton’s largest public events—Confederate Memorial Day, General Robert E. Lee’s birthday, and numerous gatherings of the United Confederate Veterans’ Williams Camp Meeting, made up of every old veteran still living in the county—drove home these messages, at the heart of which was the eternal crusade for white superiority. With whites unwilling to face up to the wrong their leaders had wrought by starting and continuing a hopeless war, or to bring their economy in line with reality, or to democratize their system after the war to welcome blacks and poor whites alike, the main thrust of southern life became the preservation of its traditions and the creation of myths. For fifty years they’d carried their propaganda north, laced with lurid tales of black inferiority, disease, and criminality. They’d been enormously successful in this. Since the early 1900s, mainstream, even liberal, magazines like Harpers, the Atlantic Monthly, and Good Housekeeping often played their tune.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“Hamilton elite, most of whom deplored incendiary speech. They’d seen the damage it could do not only in the Atlanta riot (where the judge’s son-in-law commandeered state militia troops) but in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, where distant Williams cousin Colonel Alfred Waddell had riled crowds of white men to a frenzy, resulting in wide-scale death and destruction aimed at ridding the city of black leaders and officeholders. Even though the ends in that case were to their liking, they preferred more legalistic means.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“purpose of the memorial was to show their devotion to those rebel vets both dead and still living and to teach their increasingly irreverent sons the true meaning of the Lost Cause. This gave them, many of whom were college graduates, a sense of purpose; they were the teachers and it was in the schoolroom and the Sunday school room that the most important work of indoctrination took place. In addition, the women’s suffrage movement was making itself felt throughout the country and the men reckoned on Lost Cause activity keeping their women safe from that. At 10 a.m. the brass band blared Dixie and a bevy of white-gloved ladies pulled the velvet cord that removed the white satin cloak from the gleaming statue. A gasp ran through the crowd. Hamilton had no public”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“but every time someone came before a jury looking guilty he turned out to be someone’s relative or neighbor; it was hard to be objective”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“It started back in the 1890s when men and women and children were forced to find work in the mills of Columbus and became infected with unionism and populism. Intrafamilial schisms appeared and widened around politics, and when the old planters ran for office they often had to put mothers on the podium to shame their errant sons back into the conservative fold.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“It was a crowd—red-faced and rough, jut-jawed and fierce-eyed—containing both law enforcers and lawbreakers, cops and criminals. Lately black and white crime was on the rise but it was black crime that was noticed more; in the absence of a rural police force, every white man played the part. These men had been disciplining blacks and other whites outside the legal system all their lives. From white-on-white and white-on-black “whuppings” to white-on-white ousters from churches (and white-on-black church “ousters” during slavery) to lodge trials with various punishments, they did not see courts and jails as the only (or even the best) way to handle criminal behavior. Still, the county had not had a public lynching since a slave called Boy George was staked and roasted just before the war broke out. Harris County white folks prided themselves on a more cultivated form of “Negro control,” and when time and again that failed, they took their bloodletting deep”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“The fact that Moore stayed put within easy reach of angry white men was proof to some that perhaps the papers and whoever gave them the story were not entirely on the right track. Or it’s just as likely that he had protection, perhaps called protective custody, during this brief span. Such were the tangled loyalties of the place where he’d lived all his life. For a black man, especially a mixed-race man like Moore in those days, the line between protection and prosecution was a fine one. Shivering inside his wool pea jacket, Hadley laid both whip and epithets upon the back of his mule Jake as he wrestled the buggy through the sucking mud a short distance to the forlorn shack of thirty-eight-year-old Loduska (“Dusky”) Crutchfield, who with her husband, Jim, was, like”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“In 1908 Tom Spence, a black man, was tried for rape of a black woman; no black man had been charged with raping a white woman in Harris County since Boy George at the start of the Civil War. Spence was sentenced to hang, but the Georgia Supreme Court gave him a new trial and found him innocent. The week before, clumps of white men had sat around the jailhouse waiting for him to swing and had now been let down by the decision.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“Perhaps it was the pass that most white men got for committing crimes and the uneasiness it had to cause, within themselves and the larger community, that led government officials to focus so intensely on black crime. Also, I believe a widespread fear of blacks by whites, produced by their unpunished crimes against them, also served to increase whites’ focus on “black criminality.” We understand better today how unconscious or unaddressed perceptions of individuals and groups can be projected onto others in harmful ways. I found only one man, a fearless Columbus newspaper editor named Julian Harris, who once, in the 1920s, used this idea to explain KKK behavior. While we may have a stronger grasp on this phenomenon, we still haven’t remedied it, as evidenced by our mass incarceration of African Americans entirely out of proportion to their population. The Mountain Hill district had long been a breeding ground for white outlaws, some of whom had attained the stature of heroes”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“down”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“Newly freed black men across the South were taking umbrage at the fact that, while they were falsely accused of raping white women, white men granted themselves total immunity in the matter of black women. Few”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“Editorials in support of the law equated integrated schooling with eventual interracial sex, just as any interracial activity was equated with sex by influential whites. No law specifically segregating white and black,”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“and benches. It was during the late nineteenth century that white church women began to speak out and seek legal remedies on behalf of black women and girls—including repeated, failed attempts to raise the age of consent from ten to fourteen, a move opposed by white”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“Every negro lynched is called a Big Burly Black Brute,” he, or possibly a staffer, wrote in the Record, “when in fact many of those who have been dealt with had white men for their fathers and were not only not black and burly, but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them, as is very well known to all.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

“it she blasted white ministers for their silence on and sometimes support for lynching, saying that the practice was converting white southern women and children to savages. She blamed whites’ hatred of blacks and a general state of lawlessness of the South. She took up one of Cooper’s major themes, the invasion of Negro homes by white “gentlemen” who consider “young colored girls” their “rightful prey.” If white Hamilton was listening, and by now they were hyperalert to the subversive outcries of “the enemy,” their ears were burning.”
― Karen Branan, The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth