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Growing up in Chicago offers chance after chance to come to terms with questions of identity, beginning with the city's sheer size and geographic complexity, which could easily make a person feel small, unnoticed, irrelevant. From afar, its muscular skyline -- much of it rebuilt after the Great Chicago Fire, and later expanded on landfill that pushed the original shoreline out into the lake -- conveys a certain Midwest practicality, coupled with a seeming determination to conquer the impossible. This is a city that had the fortitude to rebuild after the fire, the imagination to reverse the flow of the Chicago River. The reach of its skyline today frames the expanse of Lake Michigan, stretching north to south, with tall and taller buildings rising into the clouds, like arms of concrete and steel, limestone and granite, as if to say "We are here!" (xvi)

"In the United States, the man known as the father of gynecology, J Marion Sims, built the field in the antebellum South, operating on enslaved women in his backyard, often without anesthesia -- or, of course, consent. As C. Riley Snorton has recently documented, the distinction between biological females and women as a social category, far from a neutral scientific observation, developed precisely in order for the captive black woman to be recognized as female -- making Sims's research applicable to his women patients in polite white society -- without being granted the status of social and legal personhood. Sex was produced, in other words, precisely at the juncture where gender was denied. In this sense, a female has always been less than a person" (45).

“I can understand having been raised to believe that cops are the good guys, that racism lives in the uneven icing and not the flour and milk of the great American cake, but how can some Americans hear all these stories, line up all these body bags, and somehow still think we’re all lying? That lightning struck all these Black men randomly and without malice or systemic ease?��

"There's a type of person who thinks he's getting away with something by not believing in anything. But not believing in anything IS believing in something. It's active, not passive. To believe in nothing is to change nothing. It means you're endorsing the present, and the present is a horror."

“Comedy doesn’t just reflect the world; it shapes it. Not in the way that church ladies think heavy metal hypnotizes nerds into doing school shootings, but in the way it’s accepted fact that The Cosby Show changed America’s perception of black families. We don’t question the notion that The Daily Show had a profound effect on American politics or that Ellen opened middle America’s hearts to dancing lesbians, or that propaganda works and satire is potent and Shakespeare’s fools spoke truth to power.��