“The problem is everyone, even Black people, believes that Black poverty is the worst poverty in the world, and Black urban poverty, forget it, and all urban Blackness always scans as poverty, which means people only love us as fetish. No one is sentimental about poor Black people unless they're wise and country and you could put a photograph of them on a porch with a quilt behind them in a museum.” RacePovertyRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsUrban LifeUrban PovertyBlack Poverty Book:The Office of Historical Corrections Source: The Office of Historical Corrections
“It was the winter after the most depressing election of my adult life, a low point for my faith in the polls, and I had started keeping an unofficial tally in my head of how much I trusted each new white person I met. It was a pitiful tally, because I had decided most of them would forgive anyone who harmed me, would worry more about vocal antiracism ruining the holiday party season and causing the cheese plates to go to waste than about the lives and sanity of the nonwhite humans in their midst.” PoliticsRaceCompassionCaringAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsElectionsWhitesAntiracism Book:The Office of Historical Corrections Source: The Office of Historical Corrections
“A display cake read JUNETEENTH! in red frosting, surrounded by red, white, and blue stars and fireworks. A flyer taped to the counter above it encouraged patrons to consider ordering a Juneteenth cake early: We all know about the Fourth of July! the flyer said. But why not start celebrating freedom a few weeks early and observe the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation! Say it with cake! One of the two young women behind the bakery counter was Black, but I could guess the bakery's owner wasn't. The neighborhood, the prices, the twee acoustic music drifting out of sleek speakers: I knew all of the song's words, but everything about the space said who it was for. My memories of celebrating Juneteenth in DC were my parents taking me to someone's backyard BBQ, eating banana pudding and peach cobbler and strawberry cake made with Jell-O mix; at not one of them had I seen a seventy-five-dollar bakery cake that could be carved into the shape of a designer handbag for an additional fee. The flyer's sales pitch--so much hanging on that We all know--was targeted not to the people who'd celebrated Juneteenth all along but to office managers who'd feel hectored into not missing a Black holiday or who just wanted an excuse for miscellaneous dessert.” RaceAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsDessertsGentrificationBakeriesCakesJuneteenth Book:The Office of Historical Corrections Source: The Office of Historical Corrections
“At that, the crowd joined in--this was one of the Free Americans' rallying cries--We are the future--a cheerful way of saying the shame of the U.S. past wasn't genocide or terror but the fact that it hadn't completely worked out yet. It was nothing I hadn't heard before, but it was rattling. It was the ubiquity or it was the persistence. It was the way the Free Americans and their claims on being the only way Americans transcended facts and time and progress, the way they always seemed to be around the corner, the way, however lacking in general insight they might be, they could somehow hear the ticking clock of the question, the Do they know I'm human yet? the way they took delight in saying no, the way they took for granted that it would always be their question to answer.” HateRaceRacismBlacksWhite SupremacyRace RelationsWhite Supremacists Book:The Office of Historical Corrections Source: The Office of Historical Corrections