- Soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.
- The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine.
- The need to forgive the officer would not have moved me, because even then, in some inchoate form, I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it since birth.
- The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.
- There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally.
- It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
- In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body -- it is heritage.
- For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.
Only a few, but powerful nonetheless. The lack of my personal notes/quotes shouldn't be an indication to not read the book for yourself.
