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How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

Book by Clint Smith · 3 quotes · Blacks, Slavery, African Americans

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How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America Quotes

“Following the 2017 attack in Charlottesville and the rise in white-nationalist terrorism over the past few years, Niya sees her work not just as an extension of her personal and intellectual commitments but also as a political commitment. She thinks Monticello has an important role in helping people reckon with who they are in relation to this country's history. "I think people come to us because they're grappling with their own identity," she said. "And Monticello in particular is a place that is so intimately connected to who we are, or who we believe we are, as Americans with freedom and democracy. Yet it's also a place of bondage, and now people are really, really grappling with that question. I think it makes our work here that much more important, that we are able, maybe, to navigate people through the conversation.”

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Book:How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
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“I asked [my grandfather] if there would ever be an America in which white Americans were not actively working to keep themselves positioned atop the racial hierarchy. He thought for a moment and then said, "Some of them will never give it up.”

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“Angola prison has been regularly and casually referred to as a plantation by state authorities and media for over a century. When many people say "Angola is a prison built on a former plantation," it is often made as an unsettling observation, not as a moral indictment. Is it because our collective understanding of slavery, and its inherent violence, is so limited? Or is it that violence experienced by Black people is thought less worthy of mourning? White supremacy enacts violence against Black people, but also numbs a whole country--Black and white--to what would in any other context provoke our moral indignation.”

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Book:How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
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