Quote That Bih

[americanduppyconqueror]

… race and class, as well as other factors like gender, sexuality, citizenship, and ability status, conspire to create a dual set of realities in twenty-first-century America. For the powerful, justice is a right; for the powerless, justice is an illusion.

Marc Lamont Hill’s Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable (via americanduppyconqueror)

[americanduppyconqueror]

Oh, Beli; not so rashly, not so rashly: What did you know about states or diasporas? What did you know about Nueba Yol or unheated ‘old law’ tenements or children whose self-hate short-circuited their minds? What did you know, madame, about immigration?

Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (via americanduppyconqueror)

[quotethatbih]

This morning was the last morning I didn't know: if I stay here, I'll begin to rot from the inside out.

Jacinda Townsend's Saint Monkey

[quotethatbih]

Knowing yourself as a black person - historically, spiritually, and culturally - is not something that's given to you, institutionally; it's an arduous journey that must be undertaken by the individual.

Greg Tate in "Black to the Future," by Mark Dery

[americanduppyconqueror]

African Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers come readily to mind).

Mark Dery’s “Black to the Future” (via americanduppyconqueror)

[quotethatbih]

Is any of this real? Dangerous question. Sometimes I don't know the answer. I doubt myself. I doubt what I think I know.

Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower

[americanduppyconqueror]

I don’t like to find my books condemned as bad or praised as good, when that condemnation or that praise is based on criteria from other paradigms. I would much prefer that they were dismissed or embraced based on the success of their accomplishment within the culture out of which I write.

Toni Morrison’s “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” (via americanduppyconqueror)

[quotethatbih]

Mad with desperation, Rebeca got up in the middle of the night and ate handfuls of earth in the garden with a suicidal drive, weeping with pain and fury, chewing tender earthworms and chipping her teeth on snail shells. She vomited until dawn. She fell into a state of feverish prostration, lost consciousness, and her heart went into a shameless delirium.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (Rebeca, upon learning that the mail would not come and the love letter would not arrive.)

[quotethatbih]

. . . whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event. . . . The need for this change exists in a raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and consciousness of colonized men and women. . . . Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world . . . cannot be accomplished by . . . a gentleman's agreement.

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

[americanduppyconqueror]

Youth — which has so much more of time — is so much more impatient than maturity. Queer, is it not?

Edward Christopher Williams’s When Washington Was In Vogue (via americanduppyconqueror)

[quotethatbih]

Sometimes, when we are confronted by another overt act of intolerance in the news — another racial epithet, a further effort to erode women’s access to a full range of reproductive options, one more state attempting to hold on to its bans against marriage equality, another manifestation of rape culture — it can seem that we are going backward in this fight rather than forward. But I don’t think so. I think that, as the saying goes, it’s darkest before the dawn, that these cases stand out not necessarily because they are growing, but because they are so at odds with this country’s moral trajectory.

Charles M. Blow for The New York Times

[americanduppyconqueror]

I am so tired of waiting, Aren’t you, For the world to become good And beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife And cut the world in two— And see what worms are eating At the rind.

Langston Hughes, “Tired” (via americanduppyconqueror)

[quotethatbih]

Our best poets write poetry full of holes: The women who love women, never tell. The men who love men write of wombs. The genius who loves both is rendered mute by the complexity of choice. . .

Alice Walker

[quotethatbih]

Near Tallahassee he was picked up by sheriff's men, judged vagrant, and put on a road gang. . . . To be guarded at work by men with shotguns, to be shackled by the ankle at night to a chain, were simple matters of precaution, but the savage whippings for the least stir of will, for the smallest shred of dignity or resistance, these seemed to indicate that guards were afraid of prisoners, and Adam knew from his years in the army that a man afraid is a dangerous animal. . . . Adam. . . feared what whipping would do to his body and his spirit. . . . It is a triumph of self-control to see a man whipped until the muscles of his back show white and glistening through the cuts and to give no sign of pity or anger or interest.

John Steinbeck's East of Eden

[americanduppyconqueror]

Certain individuals, not by any means always deserving, are truly beloved of the gods.

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (via americanduppyconqueror)

[quotethatbih]

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? The Bible left me a little cold, I have to admit. Maybe I came to it at the wrong time? I was reading a lot of dirty realism, and all the genre stuff in the Good Book was a real turnoff. So many fantastic elements. Angels? I mean, come on. And it was really trying hard to be 'experimental,' with all those multiple P.O.V.s and jumping around in time. If I were in workshop with the writer, I’d say, 'Hey, hotshot, ix-nay on the egat-bays.'

Colson Whitehead for “By the Book” with The New York Times

[quotethatbih]

Man I promise, she's so self-conscious She has no idea what she's doing in college That major that she majored in don't make no money But she won't drop out, her parents will look at her funny Now, tell me that ain't insecurr The concept of school seems so secure Sophomore, three yurrs, ain't picked a carurr She like, fuck it, I'll just stay down here and do hair Cause that's enough money to buy her a few pairs of new Airs Cause her baby-daddy don't really care She's so precious with the peer pressure Couldn't afford a car so she named her daughter Alexis She had hair so long that it looked like weave Then she cut it all off, now she look like Eve And she be dealin' with some issues that you can't believe Single black female addicted to retail, and well

Kanye West’s “All Falls Down” from The College Dropout