Grandparents Quote by Ed Smith

"I can think of no one that my grandparents knew, that told me stories and that I experienced myself, had any sense of social inferiority growing up in segregated Washington. None whatsoever"

Ed Smith

About this Quote

What lands with a thud here is the refusal to perform the expected trauma script. In one stroke, Smith short-circuits a common retrospective frame for segregation: that Black life under Jim Crow is best understood primarily as internalized diminishment. His claim is not that racism wasn’t there; it’s that, inside the social world his grandparents inhabited and the one he remembers, “inferiority” wasn’t the organizing feeling. That’s a provocation aimed as much at today’s storytellers as at yesterday’s oppressors.

The sentence builds credibility through a three-generation chain of witness: “my grandparents knew,” “told me stories,” “I experienced myself.” It’s oral history and lived memory braided together, asserting authority against the archive that segregation produced (laws, headlines, school records) and against the archive we keep now (simplified morality tales). The phrase “None whatsoever” is deliberately over-specified, almost defensive, because he’s anticipating the pushback: How could anyone not feel inferior in a system designed to mark you as lesser?

Subtext: segregated Washington contained institutions, neighborhoods, churches, businesses, and social codes that could generate dignity and self-possession even while the state enforced exclusion. Smith is arguing for the psychological autonomy of a community - a reminder that oppression doesn’t automatically dictate self-concept. The intent feels corrective: to insist that survival wasn’t only endurance, it was a sustained practice of pride, insulation, and meaning-making that complicates how we narrate Black life in the segregated capital.

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