9 Quotes by Nadia Owusu

But the box, I suppose, formalized their absence, gave it a name. Knowing and accepting the inevitable are two different things.

Everything on this earth is connected!" my father exclaimed. "A better religion, to me, is the practice of noticing that connection, of deepening our understanding of it." In Christianity, there was no need for microscopes or space shuttles or radiocarbon dating. Questions were frowned upon. Everything was already decided. "And that is absolutely maddening," my father said. "If that's the case, why live?

Code-switching is dancing between vocal styles and rhythms. This dance is part celebration--of the richness, intricacies, and blurry borders of our cultures.

People of color know that not all of the safety and spoils of whiteness are available to us. Yet we can speak in the voice of whitness if we so choose. Some of us know no other voice. It was born in us. It is the voice colonization left us. Some of us adopt it later--in childhood or early adulthood -- and lose our other voices. Some of us never allow whiteness into our throats. Some of us code-switch. I am a code-switcher.

Colonialism, as I understand it, is white people stealing land from black and brown people, white people beating and killing black and brown people, white people forcing black and brown people into slavery and servitude.

Black women," Toya said as I walked her to the subway, "are the meatloaf at a Greek diner. People sometimes talk about ordering it, but everyone's surprised when someone does, even black men.

Without other humans there is no such thing as shame.

As I waited, my mind filled in the blanks, envisioned the future, wrote a nightmare of a story. Every black mother, sister, and wife in America has written some version of that story in her mind. In that story, our promises to take care of our sons, brothers, and husbands turn into lies. This a daily heartbreak. For too many, that story has become real, That story is an American terror.

There is nothing wrong with seeking truth or grace or light . . . The problem with organized religion is the assertion that all questions have already been answered . . . There is more to life, and to the universe, than what is in a single book.