The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the persistent belief in the devaluation of certain groups of people, particularly in the context of societal prejudice.
Jesmyn Ward's quote expresses a profound critique of systemic racism and inequality that continues to pervade society. By referring to the 'ugly heart of the South,' she alludes to the historical and ongoing struggles against racial discrimination, suggesting that there is a deeply ingrained belief that some individuals are inherently less valuable than others based on their identity. This statement serves as a call to awareness and action against these harmful ideologies.
In practice
During a discussion on racial equity, you might quote this to emphasize the ongoing struggle against systemic racism.
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.
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.
I think people make certain assumptions about what they're interested in reading or what others would be interested in reading, and when they think of poor black people in the South, they don't think people are interested in reading about those people.
You cannot dictate what people find funny, what people find attractive, or what people find scary. There is not a norm.
One cannot inquire into the foundations and nature of mathematics without delving into the question of the operations by which the mathematical activity of the mind is conducted. If one failed to take that into account, then one would be left studying only the language in which mathematics is represented rather than the essence of mathematics.
...What you are is a force--a force that makes it possible for your body to live, a force that makes it possible for your whole mind to dream...You are life
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.
The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.
Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.
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