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“To understand what a person means or says, it’s basically necessary to already know what that person means or is saying.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone

“For the original transgression of this land was not slavery. It was greed, and it could not be contained. More white men would come and begin to covet. And they would drag along the Africans they had enslaved. The white men would sow their misery among those who shook their chains. These white men would whip and work and demean these Africans. They would sell their children and split up families. And these white men brought by Oglethorpe, these men who had been oppressed in their own land by their own king, forgot the misery that they had left behind, the poverty, the uncertainty. And they resurrected this misery and passed it on to the Africans.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“I knew, truth be told, that a present American man would likely teach me how to be a present American man. and I couldn't imagine how those teachings would have made me healthier or more generous.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“This summer, it took one final conversation with Grandmama for me to understand that no one in our family and very few folk in this nation has any desire to reckon with the weight of where we've been. Which means no one in our family and very few folk in this nation wants to be free.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy