“I just wish we could go back to when everybody was happy." "When was everybody happy? What time was that? Did I miss getting on that train?" He leaned a bit into her space. "No one was happy, Sidney. We were just a bunch of people getting on with it, living our lives with monsters on our backs. No, nobody was happy, and nobody told the truth." "What was the truth?" "That the world wasn't ever equal. And the white folks who made it that way--the ones who fought, silent and spitting, to keep it that way--refused all responsibility for what it meant. You can't imagine the inhumanity, horrors on top of horrors. People shot in the streets, in their homes, at grocery stores, so much that after a while some white folks just kind of shrugged. No one was fighting for our bodies. And it went on like that for so long I think we all started to believe that was just the way life was supposed to be. Trust me when I tell you, I've been black all over the world and I always knew what that meant. Not welcomed anywhere, and yet there ain't nowhere else to go. Damn, what a storm in the mind.” HappinessRacePrejudiceInequalityBigotryAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsInhumanityWhites Book:Sky Full of Elephants Source: Sky Full of Elephants
“I don't hate white people. I hate the whole world for letting what happened to us go on the way it did. You telling me hundreds of years of torture and couldn't nobody stop it? And ain't nobody want to rectify it? Hell yeah, damn right I'm mad and I'll be mad forever, until the day I die, and even then I want them to set my coffin on fire so I can be mad in the afterlife. Because what happened to our people deserves that kind of mad. And if won't nobody else feel it, I'll goddamn feel it enough for everybody. That's my liberation.” HateRaceAngerLiberationAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesInequity Book:Sky Full of Elephants Source: Sky Full of Elephants