History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.
Interpretation
Historical and socio-economic factors restrict the opportunities available to individuals and communities.
This quote speaks to the profound impact of historical events and socio-economic disparities on the lives of individuals and their communities. Jesmyn Ward highlights how these forces have not only shaped her family's experiences but have also limited the choices and opportunities available to them, illustrating the interconnectedness of social justice and personal narratives.
In practice
In a discussion about systemic racism and its effects on community choices.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real.
The only way a relationship will last is if you see it as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take.
Never make a companion equal to a brother.
Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.
I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I'd be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if I'd said, 'I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that would have made the impossible possible. Maybe, but I couldn't do it, I had buried too much too deeply inside me. And here I am, instead of there.
You know, youβre a little complicated after all.β βOh no,β she assured him hastily. βNo, Iβm not really - Iβm just a - Iβm just a whole lot of different simple people.
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