There was nothing postracial about my experience, and there still isn't.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the ongoing reality of racial experiences despite the idea of a 'postracial' society.
Jesmyn Ward's quote emphasizes the stark contrast between the notion of a 'postracial' society and the lived experiences of individuals who continue to face racial issues. It underlines that discussions about race are far from over and that personal experiences are shaped significantly by one's racial identity, highlighting the necessity of acknowledging and addressing these realities in societal discourse.
In practice
In a discussion about racial issues during a seminar on diversity and inclusion.
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 responsibility of philanthropy rests with us. The wealthier we are, the more powerful we get. We cannot put the entire onus on the government.
When a faith-healer commands God to perform a miracle, in the absence of a prayer that says, 'Thy will be done,' it is, as far as I am concerned, the most rank form of arrogance . . . The faith-healer Bosworth once said that faith makes God act. If you follow that line of reasoning God is in His heaven, but Bosworth rules the world!
We're Americans, and we have a rendezvous with destiny . . . No people who have ever lived on this earth have fought harder, paid a higher price for freedom, or done more to advance the dignity of man than Americans.
The fragrance of flowers spreads only in the direction of the wind. But the goodness of a person spreads in all directions.
Time was something that largely happened to other people; he viewed it in the same way that people on the shore viewed the sea. It was big and it was out there, and sometimes it was an invigorating thing to dip a toe into, but you couldn't live in it all the time. Besides, it always made his skin wrinkle.
When I got untethered from the comfort of religion, it wasn't a loss of faith for me, it was a discovery of self. I had faith that I'm capable enough to handle any situation. There's peace in understanding that I have only one life, here and now, and [that] I'm responsible.
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