Where can students of color get intellectual validation that does not require them to so fully assimilate that they lose the best of themselves, their families, and their cultures? It occurred to me that through grade school and high school we had learned to compete, to keep up, but not to surpass; to stand alongside but not in front; to fit in but not to reshape.
Leslie Brown, “How a Hundred Years of History Tracked Me Down,” Telling Histories: Black Women Historians and the Ivory Tower, 262 (via ethiopienne)
like black butterflies 