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

Clint Smith

"I've come to realize that there's a difference between history and nostalgia, and somewhere between those two is memory."

"In overly mythologizing our ancestors, we foray an all-too important reality; the vast majority were ordinary people, which is to say they were people just like everyone else. This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence."

"A silence settled between us and I kept thinking about her refrain. I lived it. I lived it. I lived it. It echoed throughout the room and became the gravity around us. It crept into my ears and made a home in there. I watched the realization wash over her like a tide had risen around her body. There was so much I had not known about my grandmother's life until this moment. So many painful experience that she still carried deep in the marrow of her bones... I tough about all of the ways the world today is at once so different, and not so different at all."