Thick Black Theory Quotes

Marissa Theodora took out her journal, put it on her lap so Mr. Alva would not see. She penciled thoughts as they came. ‘Picture the classroom plunged into dark,’ she wrote. A touchable darkness, like the fur of a black cat. A thick fog of ink. You can move through it; just not quickly. Can’t shout through it; only talk in low soft tones.’ She frowned. Why ‘plunged into dark’? Why not ‘opened’? Darkness was already everywhere. Under the floor, between the walls. Up in space and below the earth. Everyone’s pockets were full of Dark. Our heads? Stuffed with the stuff. Close your eyelids and roll your eyes inward, and gaze into the cavern of your skull. Behold: your secret vault of Dark. Marissa considered writing that. Decided not. It sounded gloomy, even creepy.

Figure 18. As the thickness of a layer increases, the two surfaces produce a partial reflection of monochromatic light whose probability fluctuates in a cycle from 0% to 16%. Since the speed of the imaginary stopwatch hand is different for different colors of light, the cycle repeats itself at different rates. Thus when two colors such as pure red and pure blue are aimed at the layer, a given thickness will reflect only red, only blue, both red and blue in different proportions (which produce various hues of violet), or neither color (black). If the layer is of varying thicknesses, such as a drop of oil spreading out on a mud puddle, all of the combinations will occur. In sunlight, which consists of all colors, all sorts of combinations occur, which produce lots of colors.

It is at the heart of my research: black women are rational and human. Working from that assumption, I work my way analytically through political theory, economics, history, sociology, and culture. It rarely fails me. I thought about this rarity recently. Donald Trump's election had been one thing. There was clearly as aspect of race and gender at play. Women, some of them black, weighed in on what it meant that 53 percent of the white women who voted did so for Trump. But, as Trump's eclectic, manic style of governance set in, public discussion turned to ideas about Russia and fascism and economic anxiety. I understand all of these issues as ones to which black women contribute meaningful analysis.

coffa or cauphe, a kind of drink among the Turks and Persians, (and of late introduced among us) which is black, thick and bitter, destrained from Berries of that nature, and name, thought good and very wholesom: they say it expels melancholy.

We rolled on. The dirty red truck sat up big and obvious, three hundred yards ahead. It bore left around the southern fringe of Atlanta. Setting itself to strike out west, across the country. The distribution theory was looking good. I slowed down and hung back through the interchange. Didn’t want the driver to get suspicious about being followed. But I could see by the way he was handling his lane changes this was not a guy who made much use of his rearview mirrors. I closed up a little tighter. The red truck rolled on. I stayed eight cars behind it. Time rolled by. It got late in the afternoon. It got to be early evening. I ate candy and sipped water for dinner as I drove. I couldn’t work the radio. It was some kind of a fancy Japanese make. The guy at the auto shop must have transplanted it. Maybe it was busted. I wondered how he was doing with tinting the Bentley’s windows. I wondered what Charlie was going to say about getting her car back with black glass. I figured maybe that was going to be the least of her worries. We rolled on. We rolled on for almost four hundred miles. Eight hours. We drove out of Georgia, right through Alabama, into the northeast corner of Mississippi. It got pitch dark. The fall sun had dropped away up ahead. People had switched their lights on. We drove on through the dark for hours. It felt like I had been following the guy all my life. Then, approaching midnight, the red truck slowed down. A half-mile ahead, I saw it pull off into a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. Near a place called Myrtle. Maybe sixty miles short of the Tennessee state line. Maybe seventy miles shy of Memphis. I followed the truck into the lot. Parked up well away from it. I saw the driver get out. A tall, thickset type of a guy. Thick neck and wide, powerful shoulders. Dark, in his thirties. Long arms, like an ape. I knew who he was. He was Kliner’s son. A stone-cold psychopath. I watched him. He did some stretching and yawning in the dark standing by his truck. I stared at him and pictured him Thursday night, at the warehouse gate, dancing. THE KLINER KID LOCKED UP THE TRUCK AND AMBLED OFF

He turned and said to me, “I'm not just cursing people at random.” Everyone has a 'thick face.' I'm only taking that false face and peeling it off.

Jules-Henri Poincaré, (1854–1912) was, according to James Newman, . . . a French savant who looked alarmingly like a French savant. He was short and plump, carried an enormous head set off by a thick spade beard and splendid mustache, was myopic, stooped, distraught in speech, absent-minded and wore pince-nez glasses attached to a black silk ribbon.5 Poincaré was another mathematician in the long line of child prodigies that we have met along the way. He grew up to be the leading French mathematician of his time. Nevertheless, Poincaré made the great mistake of underestimating the accomplishments of a student named Louis Bachelier, who earned a degree in 1900 at the Sorbonne with a dissertation tided “The Theory of Speculation.”6 Poincaré, in his review of the thesis, observed that “M. Bachelier has evidenced an original and precise mind [but] the subject is somewhat remote from those our other candidates are in the habit of treating.” The thesis was awarded “mention honorable,” rather than the highest award of “mention très honorable” which was essential for anyone hoping to find a decent job in the academic community. Bachelier never found such a job. Bachelier’s thesis came to light only by accident more than fifty years after he wrote it. Young as he was at the time, the mathematics he developed to explain the pricing of options on French government bonds anticipated by five years Einstein’s discovery of the motion of electrons—