Macarthur Fellows

"I step out, legs trembling a little but my heart full, and set forth on the next journey, entrusting myself to the beauty and danger of life all over again. (Author's Note)"

"“The only way to deal with fear is to treat it like an unwelcome guest. If you keep entertaining it, you’ll never be rid of it.” (Amara)"

""I think if your dreams are small they can get lost, like trying to find a needle in a haystack...When a dream is big, you can see it better and hold on to it." (Ruthie)"

"displacement has been a common path for Jews throughout history; they’ve always been displaced from one place to another, through diaspora, through a sense of expulsion, not being welcome anymore, being truly forced out."

"“But wherever I go, I know I will feel most at home with the wounded of the world, who hold their heads up high no matter how broken they may seem.”"

"reading is one of our greatest human treasures, to be passed on from generation to generation, so the world might be a better place for everyone. (Acknowledgements)"

"I think the most fundamental thing we can do to make the world a better place is to be open to the stories of people, to listen and take in the lived experiences of others. Stories have the power to change the world. Understanding the hopes and dreams of another person, we learn that we are all connected, and that to nurture all of our communities, our families, and our individual lives we must nurture one another."

"That is the magic of writing, and also the challenge of writing, not knowing what will happen until it’s on the page."

"When we lived in Cuba, I was smart. But when we got to Queens, in New York City, in the United States of America, I became dumb, just because I couldn't speak English. (first lines)"

"“Why is it that bad things have to happen so you learn there are lots of good people in the world?" (Ruthie)"

"Being alive is the best gift of all. (p139)"

"I often say that I am Jewish because I am Cuban. I feel gratitude toward Cuba because my four grandparents found refuge there in the years before WW II at a time when the door was closed to them in the United States. If not for the welcome they received in Cuba, I would not have been born. My family came to love Cuba. When we left in the 1960s, to start a new life again in the United States after the turn to communism, it was with great sorrow. My family lived through a double exodus, a double migration, from Europe to Cuba, and then from Cuba to the United States. If we had not been given refuge twice, we would not have survived. Knowing that my ancestors fled persecution and genocide, I believe we should be compassionate and humane toward immigrants and foster policies of welcome, kindness, and generosity of spirit."

"there are just a lot of stories that I hope won’t be lost. I want to be sure that this legacy remains, even though it’s a miniature community and maybe not of great interest to everybody in the world. Especially for writers like myself, who come from minority backgrounds—we’re trying to fill in absences or gaps. There was obviously no literature like Tia Fortuna when I was growing up. There’s this very large Jewish Latino community in Miami, but they’re just not represented in literature. I felt that was a gap that I could fill."

"Contemporary Sephardic writers in Latin America include Ana Maria Shua in Argentina, Isaac Chocrón in Venezuela, Ruth Behar in Cuba, Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, and Rosa Nissan in Mexico, and Victor Perera in Guatemala. They write about Jewish life-Sephardic and otherwise in the modern world."

"self-interrogation is a special quality of anthropological work, one that we don’t see enough of in fiction. Sometimes in fiction, authors hide or erase the work and interrogation that they may have done to be able to write their novels. But in ethnography, we often include that interrogation within our texts. And to me, that’s an inspiring part of our storytelling."

"Healing is a journey and it takes its own sweet time. What a gift it is to get a second chance at life when the worst is past. (Author's Note)"

"In my children’s fiction, I also want to teach them ideas. I don’t want them just to have a story: I’m giving somebody who perhaps knows nothing about Sephardic Jews a sense of that culture. Even if it is a preliminary sense, it’s an affirmation that this culture and these people exist. In that way, I’m bringing my ethnographic work even into a domain like the picture book."

"[Observing the Trump rally at The Ellipse preceding the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021] The imagery of Trumpism is about strength and cruelty and dominance even as the rhetoric is about loss and grievance and victimization: about what was taken and what must be seized back by strength."

"Trump's campaign rhetoric so often flirts with incitements to violence that most of those comments scarcely even make the news. We are long accustomed to him denouncing his opponents or his judges or members of the news media as traitors. He must come up with something truly striking and original—for example, calling for the chairman of the joint chiefs to be executed for treason—to make us take notice."

"The thousands of crusaders were pouring from Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues and coursing freely, like blood from an open wound, onto the unobstructed Capitol grounds. Screaming protesters, some shooting pepper spray or bear spray or thrusting their flags like spears, had been facing off against the outnumbered and under-armed Capitol Police since before Trump had finished speaking. Already the flimsy line of metal barriers had been breached, the crowd had pushed past the base of the steps, the single line of police, broken and bedraggled, struggled to keep them out of the building."

"By virtue of Trump's embodied grievance, his shamelessness, and his daring and skill at shaping a narrative—and then, when it is debunked, shaping another—Trump proves himself victorious, again and again, in attracting and holding eyeballs, which are the golden currency of our age. That American politics was destined to be absorbed by television and the communication and entertainment media it spawned could be foreseen as far back as John F. Kennedy, but the "reality star" Donald Trump is this new world's first grand apotheosis."

"[At a campaign event held at Freeland, Michigan on September 10, 2020. President Donald Trump:] "We brought you a lot of car plants, Michigan! We brought you a lot of car plants. You know that, right?" Comes in prompt response the ear-splitting roar of affirmation, clear as clear can be: Yes, Mr. President, we know that! A joyful knowledge, a knowledge to celebrate: all those jobs in all those car plants! But what exactly is it possible to know about those car plants? I could not have been the only one in that obstreperous crowd, made up overwhelmingly of Michiganders, to know the presumably important fact that, well ... those car plants didn’t exist. [Ellipses and italics in the original source] Any member in good standing of the ancient "reality-based community" could have told you that since the coming of Trump no new car plants had been built in Michigan, that since his ascension not less than three thousand Michiganders had lost jobs in the vital auto sector."

"[After referring to warnings from the FBI and Trump's tweets to his supporters] Despite these warnings, Capitol Police leaders failed to request or assign a single extra police officer to duty that day, and few who were on duty were in riot gear. Mutual sympathies between police and Trump marchers are well known—"Back the Blue!" is a frequent chant at his rallies—and there were clearly many police and military among the marchers."

"[I]n a system of government built on dispersed power that can function only through compromise—in which a policy progresses through the bureaucracy by officials "working" a problem, not dictating a solution—Trump's authoritarian strain was repeatedly frustrated. He knew instinctively how to dominate the news cycle. But for all his self-promotion as a genius in "the art of the deal," his inability to focus or to lead meant that he never figured out how to convert that attention into power within the government that would help him put his policies, however ill-judged, into effect. Instead he fought against the obstacles that the institutions and the laws represented."

"Still, however much we want to relegate the events of January 6 to the realm of the near-missed catastrophe, our politics remain imprisoned in a series of events unfolding from that day. The coup did not end on January 6 or even in the early hours of January 7, when Congress finally certified the election of the new president. Today this unfinished chain of cause and effect—call it a slow-motion coup—continues to unfold before the country. The coup drives news coverage. The coup elects candidates. And the coup has already gone far toward leaching from our democracy the one element indispensable for a peaceful politics: the legitimacy of our means of conferring power. By launching and leading his slow-motion coup, Donald Trump has led the country into an unfamiliar and darker world."

"That the Steal came fully formed from the president's mind and grew thanks to the fear and negligence of the politicians who thought they could "humor" him, that such a demonstrably false idea is now, as a firmly held belief of half the American electorate, a dominating strain in American history—that these astonishing events could come to disfigure the public life of the United States testifies to the decadence of the country's traditional hierarchies of power and information."

"During my research on ghost tours in the South that included slavery as a theme, I found that many of these tours had characteristics in common, such as the romanticization of relationships between enslavers and the enslaved, the diminishment of the sexual abuse that enslaved Black women endured, a gratuitous focus on violence, an exoticization of Black faith traditions, and a demonization of white women. I would say that if tourists hear narratives about slavery that sound too easy-going to be true or too grotesque to be respectful of people’s lived experience, they are probably listening to exaggerated or fabricated narratives crafted to increase revenue rather than to educate the public."

"I look for strong female characters that are up against challenges but are OK in the end."

"It is indeed a delicate task to work with evidentiary sources as well as the imagination to interpret the past, but I would argue that historians do this all the time. We always bring our creative mental faculties to bear when reconstructing the past. We draw inferences from sources, speculate about cause and effect, and envision times and places that we can never experience directly. Some scholars (and I count myself among them!) enjoy the challenge of pushing this process further to write history in intentionally narrative ways and even to write fiction based on historical knowledge and primary sources."

"Do those concerns about cancel culture and McCarthyism and censorship only apply to the left or do they apply to the POTUS threatening to investigate schools for teaching American journalism? Silence is deafening here."

"I have dedicated my life’s work to excavating the modern legacy of transatlantic slavery"

"We gather here to mark the global trade that took some 15 million beloved human beings across the Atlantic in the hulls of barbaric ships, the largest forced migration in the history of the world, one that would reshape the entire Atlantic world and transform the global economy. We must never forget the scale and the depth of the horrors that people of African descent suffered in the name of profit, profit that enriched the European colonial powers and built the nascent economy of the United States. We must never forget how the systems of slavery collapsed, only to be reborn in other models of violent and racist economic exploitation, such as what we benignly call Jim Crow in the United States, but what is more aptly called apartheid."

"This has been a fundamental problem with news institutions, now and in the past. They attempt to cover racism and inequality without understanding it themselves."

"According to head of Chicago police union, assaulting police like this was fine because these folks were frustrated."

"People on the right have been very afraid of a narrative that doesn't deify our founding, that actually forces us to confront it, because that leads to change. When people know better oftentimes they do better. We are seeing that now."

"just as important to remembering the legacy of the transatlantic slavery are the stories of Black resistance that would, more than any other force, lead to slavery’s collapse in our hemisphere."

"So, what we saw yesterday, again, is both shocking and utterly within the realm of what we know this country to be. The way law enforcement responds to Black protestors compared to white insurrectionist the most predictable aspect of all of this."

"We've only had multiracial democracy in this country for fewer than 60 years, meaning we've only had democracy in the US for fewer than 60 years. In places where Black people outnumbered white, we had violent minority rule. If you don't understand this, what are you reporting? We can keep pretending that economic anxiety is leading millions of Americans to be willing to subvert democracy but that is a willful blindness and an abdication of our duty to report the truth. We can keep pretending that our institutions will hold, but that defies history. Fears about eroding democracy are not abstract for the millions of Americans who will lose rights and suffer under a white Christian nationalist regime that does not believe a multiracial citizenry should be sharing power of governing."

"When politicians decided protests shouldn't happen, Black people shouldn't vote, Black children shouldn't integrate schools, they called on law enforcement to enforce their desires, even when courts had ordered compliance with these rights."

"Of course many police officers have nothing to do with white nationalist groups, but there's never been a time where significant numbers did NOT engage with and share sympathies with white supremacists. The history of American policing begins in some places w the slave patrols."

"As we remember our brutal enslavement by people who believed themselves to be civilized, even as they tortured, abused and murdered other human beings for profit, for sugar for their tea, for molasses for their rum, for cotton to wear and for tobacco to smoke, we must remember most the fierce Black radical tradition of resistance, that did not begin with anti-colonialism efforts on the continent or with civil rights movements in the United States and other places, but with, as the scholar Cedric Robinson argued, the Cimarrones of Mexico, who ran away to Indigenous communities or formed their own fugitive communities known as palenques..."

"We cannot make up for all the lives lost and dreams snatched, for all the suffering endured. But we can atone for it. We can acknowledge the crime. And we can do something to try to set things right, to ease the hardship and hurt of so many of our fellow Americans."

"To this day, the only Americans who have ever received government restitution for slavery were white enslavers in Washington, D.C., whom the federal government compensated after the Civil War for their loss of human property."

"None of us can be held responsible for the wrongs of our ancestors. But if today we choose not to do the right and necessary thing, that burden we own."

"The hundred-year period of racial apartheid and racial terrorism known as Jim Crow."

"The racism we are fighting today was originally conjured to justify working unfree Black people, often until death, to generate extravagant riches for ... all the ancillary white people ... who earned their living and built their wealth from that free Black labor."

"School curricula generally treat slavery as an aberration in a free society, and textbooks largely ignore the way that many prominent men, women, industries, and institutions profited from and protected slavery."

"Reparations amount to a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it, and our federal government initiated, condoned, and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against Black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that would pay [reparations]."

"If we are truly a great nation, the truth cannot destroy us."

"I think that we are ill-prepared for the moment that we’re in. I think too many political reporters just have too much faith in our political systems, and there is no evidence to back up that faith. So, I just hope that before it’s too late, enough of us get an understanding that we can’t cover what’s happening in our country right now as politics as usual, and you can’t dismiss all of these scholars of authoritarianism who are raising the alarm. We’ve got to do better. We know that reporting, the press, is the firewall of our democracy, and I don’t think the firewall is holding right now."