Daily Inspiration Quote by Christopher Darden

The tell in Darden's line is the word "forgot". It’s offered as praise, but it carries the uneasy logic of “transcendence”: the highest compliment, in some corners of mainstream reviewing, is that a Black woman’s Blackness becomes ignorable. Coming from a lawyer who lived inside the O.J. Simpson media hurricane, Darden is acutely aware of how identity gets litigated in public. Here he’s pointing to a cultural jury of sorts - critics and readers - and describing the moment when they stop seeing a “category” and start seeing “people.”

That’s the stated intent: to argue that a story centered on a Black woman can operate at full emotional volume without being treated as niche, sociological, or “about race” in a narrow way. He wants to elevate craft and character over what he calls “the little things,” a telling phrase that tries to shrink identity into a minor detail rather than a lived structure of experience.

The subtext is more complicated. “They were moved... not by the little things” implies that being moved by Blackness, or noticing it, is lesser reading - sentimental, political, or distractible. It flatters reviewers for achieving a supposedly higher, color-blind empathy. But color-blindness is not neutral; it’s a preference shaped by a culture that marks whiteness as default and asks everyone else to justify their presence on the page.

So the quote works as both aspiration and diagnostic: it celebrates narrative connection while quietly revealing the gatekeeping standard still haunting “universal” storytelling.