“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”
— Kazuo Ishiguro, in his Nobel prize (2017) acceptance speech. (via halcynth)
“I believe that introversion is my greatest strength. I have such a strong inner life that I’m never bored and only occasionally lonely. No matter what mayhem is happening around me, I know I can always turn inward.”
i am just very uncomfortable with the way i am perceived like there’s a disconnect between my actual identity and the identity ppl assume i have and it makes me uncomfortable and stressed out
So I’m reading We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates. In chapter 7, titled “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” it states:
Randall Kennedy, a law professor at Harvard, writes that “many jurisdictions made slaves into ‘criminals’ by prohibiting them from pursuing a wide range of activities that whites were typically free to pursue.” Among these activities were: learning to read, leaving their masters’ property without a proper pass, engaging in “unbecoming” conduct in the presence of a white female, assembling to worship outside the supervisory presence of a white person, neglecting to step out of the way when a white person approached on a walkway, smoking in public, walking with a cane, making loud noises, or defending themselves.
THAT’S WHY their asses don’t know how to move, like to move, nor know how to say excuse me to pass. Ingrained generational behavior smfh.
Finished the book. Here’s more quotes from the book and my review:
“America is literally unimaginable without plundered labor shackled to plundered land, without the organizing principle of whiteness as citizenship, without the culture crafted by the plundered, and without that culture itself being plundered.”
“And I now knew that the line dividing black and white America was neither phenotypical, nor cultural, nor even genetic. In fact, there was no line at all, no necessary division of any kind. We were not two sides of a coin. We were not the photonegative of each other. To be black in America was to be plundered. To be white was to benefit from, and at times directly execute, this plunder. No national conversation, no invocations to love, no moral appeals, no pleas for ‘sensitivity’ and ‘diversity,’ no lamenting of ‘race relations’ could make this right. Racism was banditry, pure and simple. And the banditry was not incidental to America, it was essential to it.”
There is so much to unpack from this raw, honest, dense collection of eight essential essays originally published in The Atlantic—one penned each year of the Obama presidency—providing an extensive, detailed analysis on the framework of white supremacy in America built on “black plunder and white democracy,” chattel slavery, racism, segregation, racially motivated violence and coldblooded killings, mass incarceration fostering things such as racially discriminatory practices (Jim Crow laws, redlining, housing policies, bank policies), making way for America’s first white president to bloom what had been planted and watered for centuries.
“Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his correct name and rightful honorific—America’s first white president.”
Armed Man Steps In To Protect Pregnant Black Woman During Argument With A Khaki-Wearing Florida Crazy At Walmart
(That black man pulled out that gun so slick…he had time TUHday!!!) ✊🏿✊🏿✊🏿
Okay but how is this white man gonna pull up on a pregnant woman, swing on a black man and then lie about it??? Like the amount of lies that man told on camera??? Jesus
Black people are fucking hilarious.
The comedic timing of “I aint use shit yet!” made me bust out laughing.
