Jherane Patmore

“Incarceration is a sustained, lifetime lynching, meant to discard your soul and make a shell of you in plain life. Make you into your monster self, the beast that comes out when you are forced to survive in the absence of love and safety. Never mind that most of us come broken and traumatized, we still are no longer worth our own humanity. We are a criminal. We need punishment and to be rehabilitated. We need shame and exclusion. We are not worthy of control of our own lives; we are hopeless and evil. We are not individuals or of a womb or a family. We are not absent from anywhere else; because we are here, we simply non-exist. The world is better without us. In this society we are taught our crimes are the summations of our lives and define the limits of our possibility. Our only potential is to harm and destroy.”
― Junauda Petrus, The Stars and the Blackness Between Them

“Only two types of white people in this world, chile, the ones doing shit to you and the ones wanting you to tell them ’bout the shit them other ones did.”
― Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“Collective memory, the foundation of any culture's narrative, is a historical; mythology, laces with figments of truth, is essential to forming a country's founding identity and maintaining social cohesion.”
― Padraig O'Malley, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine--A Tale of Two Narratives

“Mami still had an air around Papi,
like he was a medicine she knew she needed
even as she cringed at the taste.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Clap When You Land