I think that often in the United States we're very blind to the ways that history lives in the present.
Interpretation
This quote highlights how historical events and legacies continue to influence contemporary society and perceptions.
Jesmyn Ward emphasizes the importance of recognizing the impact of history on the present day. In the quote, she points out that people often overlook how the past shapes their current realities, possibly leading to a lack of awareness about ongoing social issues and cultural dynamics that have roots in historical events.
In practice
In a lecture about social justice, this quote could highlight the need to understand historical contexts.
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.
History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.
I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.
History had been man's effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man's ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do.
The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.
Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society.
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