Open Books Open Minds (2022/2023) - The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

"I turn, always, to books because reading is the ultimate act of leaving your body, writing the ultimate prayer. You send words into the world and hope that someone is there listening, someone willing to leave their body to meet you halfway in the space between language and air. I have always found hope in this space, even as a little black girl in a church dress and white tights, daydreaming during a long sermon, amazed that I could be anywhere."

"That summer, as my country splintered over whether an unarmed black teen-ager deserved to die, something shifted inside me. That summer, I awoke."

"In America’s contemporary imagination, terrorism is foreign and brown. Those terrorists do not have complex motivations. We do not urge one another to reserve judgment until we search through their Facebook histories or interview their friends. We do not trot out psychologists to analyze their mental states. We know immediately why they kill. But a white terrorist is an enigma. A white terrorist has no history, no context, no origin. He is forever unknowable. His very existence is unspeakable. We see him, but we pretend we cannot. He is a ghost floating in the night."

"Over the past two weeks, I have fluctuated between anger and grief. I feel surrounded by Black death. What a privilege, to concern yourself with seeming good while the rest of us want to seem worthy of life."