“All too often we as a Black community allow systemic entities to do character reporting and judgment casting on protests, uprisings, our slain, and family/friends of our slain. This is all an attempt to distract the public from the injustices that got us there in the first place.”
“Amma was shorter, with African hips and thighs perfect slave girl material one director told her when she walked into an audition for a play about Emancipation whereupon she walked right back out again in turn a casting director told Dominique she was wasting his time when she turned up for a Victorian drama when there weren’t any black people in Britain then she said there were, called him ignorant before also leaving the room and in her case, slamming the door”
“No togetherness, no tomorrow.”
“A racial joke is a hiss.”
“Don t speak of your Protestant minister, Nor of his church without meaning or faith, For the foundation stone of his temple Was the bollocks of Henry VIII Brendan Behan”
“Whenever there is injustice, whenever there is oppression, whenever there is suffering, a human will rise to the rescue of righteousness and obliteration of savagery, they may be called Naskar, they may be called Christ, they may be called Buddha or anything else, the name is irrelevant, but the promise is absolute. And to keep that promise is the existential duty of every human being with a wide awake conscience and upright spine.”
“... the truth is that not enough carriers of this virus have ever been willing to risk the potential loss of any aspect of their social capital to find out what kind of America might lie on the other side of segregation. They are very happy to blackout their social media for a day, to read all-black books, and educate themselves about black issues — as long as this education does not occur in the form of actual black children attending their actual schools.”
“A lot of people want to skip ahead to the finish line of racial harmony. Past all this unpleasantness to a place where all wounds are healed and the past is laid to rest.”
“The Southern strategy of the Nixon administration is based upon the same principle as the Compromise of 1876: namely, that Northern Republicans and Southern conservatives share common interests and together can rule this nation. I do not think it is possible to condemn too harshly what the President has done in the South in order to form this alliance. Indeed, I can think of no recent President who has more blatantly sacrificed the ideals of equality and racial justice for his own political ends. Nor is Nixon simply riding the wave of reaction. He is encouraging that reaction, for he knows that he became President because of divisions in the society, and that it is in his interest that these divisions grow wider.”
“Although he (Senator Robert Byrd) apologized numerous times for what he considered a youthful indiscretion, his early votes in Congress---notably a filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act---reflected racially separatist views.”
“In several interviews, Byrd acknowledged that he had briefly briefly been a member of the KKK, and blamed it on youthful indiscretion . In fact, his involvement with the KKK was far more extensive than he ever admitted. In the early 1940s, Byrd recruited 150 of his friends and associates to form a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Crab Orchard, West Virginia.”
“Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, another powerful Democratic leader, was known as a defender of civil rights during his three decades on the Supreme Court. But what many do not know is that Justice Black was a prominent and secretive member of the KKK. He supposedly resigned membership in 1925, but it was later discovered that he was subsequently welcomed back into the Klan and given a lifetime membership.”
“When you look at racism, it s nothing but pure arrogance, unintelligent and shallow minded in the minds and hearts of men.”
“In 1953, the Supreme Court ended this circumvention of Shelley. It ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment precluded state courts not only from evicting African Americans from homes purchased in defiance of a restrictive covenant but also from adjudicating suits to recover damages from property owners who made such sales. Still, the a Court refused to declare that such private contracts were unlawful or even that county clerks should be prohibited from accepting deeds that included them.”
“Revolution against injustice anywhere in the world brings benefit and justice for everyone everywhere in the world.”
“...The War on Drugs began at a time when illegal drug use was on the decline. During this same time period however, a war was declared, causing mass arrests and convictions for drug offences to sky rocket, especially among people of colour. The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase. The United States now has the highest rates of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, Chine and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In United States, the rate is roughyl eight time that, or 750 per 100,000.”
“What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colourblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion and social contempt. So we don t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of colour criminals and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways it was once legal to discriminate against African-Americans. Once you re labelled a felon, the old forms of discrimination, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service - are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”