Becoming

It’s a small moment, insignificant in the end. It’s still with me for no reason but the silliness, for how it unpinned me just briefly from the more serious agenda that guided my every day.

“Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”

White families, meanwhile, were moving out of the city in droves, lured by the suburbs—the promise of better schools, more space, and probably more whiteness, too.

relished the swerve.

I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it “angry” or “black” or “woman”?

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly.

if we got too wound up about the grouchiness downstairs. Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

It lived in every last thing we deemed unfixable, including ourselves.

weariness in people—especially black people—a cynicism bred from a thousand small disappointments over time.