I do think that people will claim a certain fatigue about talking about race. But I think that even though they do, it's still necessary - completely necessary.
Interpretation
Addressing race-related issues is essential, even if people grow tired of discussing them.
In this quote, Jesmyn Ward highlights the importance of ongoing conversations about race, acknowledging that while there may be fatigue surrounding the topic, it remains crucial for societal understanding and progress. She suggests that avoiding the dialogue due to exhaustion is not an option, as it is necessary for addressing inequalities and fostering change.
In practice
In a community meeting focused on diversity and inclusion initiatives.
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.
We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.
You can't change your past but you can change you destiny but deciding for Christ.
She was so busy forgetting, she couldn't take a single step into the future.
What can change the world today is the same thing that has changed it in the past-an idea and the service of dedicated, committed individuals to that idea.
It is time for blacks to begin the shift from a wartime to a peacetime identity, from fighting for opportunity to the seizing of it.
You want to change your life? Control the only thing you can control: the meaning you give something.
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