Hope

“Eight in ten Black people would not be in the United States were it not for the institution of slavery in a society founded on ideals of freedom.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“It was a freedom that understood what it was against but not what it was for, a malnourished and mean kind of freedom that kept you out of chains but did not provide bread or shelter or a means to get ahead.”
― Matthew Desmond, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.”
― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45

“Words, I explained, were not bad in and of themselves, but carried histories that require attentiveness and sensitivity.”
― Julietta Singh, The Breaks: An Essay