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Quote by Emily Austin

“The bus I am riding on must be on its way to a garbage convention. Never before has a more rancid assemblage of people congregated. I am at this moment privy to a momentous moment in the history of human smell. My name will probably be memorized by future students, preparing to answer this frequently asked exam question: Who demonstrated a supernatural ability to remain conscious on the most disgusting vehicle to ever disturb our debauched world?”

Quote by Emily Austin

Book:Oh Honey
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Oh Honey

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Emily Austin

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“I’m not saying I’ll turn down a good road trip, but it has been the trains, ferries, subways, and most frequently the buses that have most helped me travel the world. When I want to explore a place, to get a sense of its culture, people, and neighborhoods (even my own), I have found that there is no better way to travel than public transportation. Crowded or nearly empty, full of conversations or silence, scheduled or unscheduled, with live chickens or Styrofoam packets of eggs, on sleek coaches or beat-up minibuses, whether in my hometown or a new town in a foreign country: traveling on public transportation becomes a primary insight into a place and culture.”

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“They took it for more than it was, or anyhow for more than it said; the container was greater than the thing contained, and Lincoln became at once what he would remain for them, “the man who freed the slaves.” He would go down to posterity, not primarily as the Preserver of the Republic-which he was-but as the Great Emancipator, which he was not.”

PoliticsSlaveryAmerican Civil WarPolitics Of The United StatesSlavery In The United StatesSlavery In AmericaAbraham Lincoln
Book:The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville
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“The mythology serves purposes darker than sentiment, nothing more so than the currently popular, and arrantly nonsensical, assertion that Lee freed his inherited slaves in 1862 before the war was over, while Grant kept his until the Thirteenth Amendment freed them in 1865. The subtext is transparent. If Southerner Lee freed his slaves while Northerner Grant kept his, then secession and the war that followed can hardly have had anything to do with slavery and must instead have been over the tariff or state rights, or some other handy pretext invented to cloak slavery’s pivotal role.”

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Book:Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee--The War They Fought, The Peace They Forged
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“You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said. Most Americans, we have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that? “Africans are not black,” she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.” What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them, she said. “They don’t become black until they go to America or come to the U.K.,” she said. “It is then that they become black.”

HistorySlaverySlavery In The United StatesAfrican Slavery
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“One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one's ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slave holder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slave holder is patriotism á la carte.”

RacismSlaveryPatriotismRacism In AmericaReparationsSlavery In The United States
Book:We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
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