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The birth canal of Black women or women who birth blackness, then, is another kind of domestic Middle Passage; the birth canal, that passageway from the womb through which a fetus passes during birth. The belly of the ship births blackness; the birth canal remains in, and as, the hold. The belly of the ship births blackness (as no/relation). Think now of those incarcerated women in the United States who are forced to give birth shackled, their pain ignored. They are forced to deliver while shackled even when that shackling is against the law. Birthing in the belly of the state: birthed in and as the body of the state. The slave ship, the womb, and the coffle, and the long dehumanizing project; we continue to be the feel and be the fall...out.

— In the wake : on Blackness and being by Christina Sharpe (Page 74)

There have been studies done on whales that have died and have sunk to the seafloor. These studies show that within a few days the whales bodies are picked almost clean by benthic organisms-those organisms that live on the seafloor. My colleague Anne Gardulski tells me it is most likely that a human body would not make it to the seafloor intact. What happened to the bodies? By which I mean, what happened to the components of their bodies in salt water? Anne Gardulski tells me that because nutrients cycle through the ocean (the process of organisms eating organisms is the cycling of nutrients through the ocean), the atoms of those people who were thrown overboard are out there in the ocean even today. They were eaten, organisms processed by them, and those organisms were in turn eaten and processed, and the cycle continues. Around 90 to 95 percent of the tissues of things that are eaten in the water column get recycled. As Anne told me, 'Nobody dies of old age in the ocean.'

The amount of time it takes for a substance to enter the ocean and then leave the ocean is called residence time. Human blood is salty, and sodium, Gardulski tells me, has a residence time of 260 million years. And what happens to the energy that is produced in the waters? It continues cycling like atoms in residence time. We, Black people, exist in the residence time of the wake, a time in which 'everything is now. It is all now' (Morrison 1987, 198).

— In the wake : on Blackness and being by Christina Sharpe (Page 40 - 41)

The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up.

— White Rage by Carol Anderson (Page 15)

In the same ways that we have to reckon with the transgenerational trauma of our history in the West, White people must also reckon with the trauma of complicity when it comes to the brutality that exists in their own bloodlines. The ability to enslave a whole group of people, to enjoy meals and laugh with their children as other humans are lynched from trees, undeniably created a multi-generational hardening of their own capacity for empathy and benevolence. This translates into being able to watch video after video of Black people being blatantly and obviously brutalized and still comfortably go about one's merry day. Meanwhile, Black folks continue to grip—though with less and less earnestness—our ace in the hole that wins every game, every time: our humanity.

— Black Joy by Tracey Michae'l Lewis-Giggetts (Page 109)

Poet E. Ethelbert Miller wrote that "if we are to be activists of any kind, we should be motivated by what begins in the center of our hearts." Likewise, if true large-scale revolution is ever going to take place if there ever will come a time when there is a complete overturning of the White supremacist systems that are at the root of our justice and social systems-it will likely come about because enough of our hearts have been lit with the fire of protest in our personal lives.

— Black Joy by Tracey Michae'l Lewis-Giggetts (Page 89)

Black folks have always imagined being more when our reality said different. We've used a myriad of things to capture that feeling, but the most powerful conduit has been our art. It's been said that we lose ourselves in music or literature or art. I disagree. I think we find ourselves there. Our humanity is forced to live in our imaginations as a kind of holding cell, until we can make them realities through our fight. Just like sixteen-year-old Tracey, I don't think Black folks create to escape. We create to reimagine. To blaze a path toward reinvention when our creations are stolen and commodified. To be when we are told that our only purpose is to do.

— Black Joy by Tracey Michae'l Lewis-Giggetts (Page 78)