Quote of the day – the “process of deranged self-construction”

“Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.”

- p. 52 of Toni Morrison’s very Sartrean examination of “the parasitical nature of white freedom,” identity, and “self-valorization and validation” - Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)