“America was paralyzed; on one hand, by the power of the Southern Democrats in Congress, whose inordinate political strength and control of key committees was based on their ability to win reelection after reelection because of massive disfranchisement and racial terror; and on the other, by the missionary-like belief that America was the champion of democracy and freedom in the battle against the Soviet Union, whose death grip on human rights had no limits.”
“Black people will never find justice, because the law is not created to favor them, but is created to enslave them.”
“The VRA was nevertheless a seismic shift in thought, action, and execution for the U.S. government when compared with the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and its equally enfeebled companion legislation of 1960. Rather than passively waiting for locales to violate the rights of American citizens and then sitting still until those who had been routinely brutalized by this system made a formal complaint, the VRA put the responsibility for adhering to the Constitution onto state and local governments.”
“In short, Virginia ensured that there would be schooling for whites but not blacks; and after that, the state changed its laws so that those who were illiterate would not be able to vote.”
“[Jeff] Sessions was someone who thinks that the VRA ought not to have ever been in existence because, for him, it was an intrusive piece of legislation. Thus, in a move that flipped the Voting Rights Act on its head, his investigation targeted only counties where African Americans had won office.”
“Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist and founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which eventually crafted voter suppression legislation that spread like a cancer throughout the United States, was brutally clear: I don t want everybody to vote.”
“All that had to happen was for the GOP to reinforce the lie of voter fraud, create the public perception of democracy imperiled, increase the groundswell to protect the integrity of the ballot box, require exactly the type of identification that blacks, the poor, the young, and the elderly did not have, and, equally important, mask these acts of aggressive voter suppression behind the nobility of being civic-minded.”
“Unlike babies, phenomena are typically born long before humans give them names. Zurara did not call Black people a race. French poet Jacques de Brézé first used the term “race” in a 1481 hunting poem. In 1606, the same diplomat who brought the addictive tobacco plant to France formally defined race for the first time in a major European dictionary, “Race…means descent,” Jean Nicot wrote in the Trésor de la langue française. “Therefore, it is said that a man, a hors, a dog or another animal is from a good or bad race.” From the beginning, to make races was to make racial hierarchy. Gomes de Zurara grouped all those peoples from Africa into a single race for that very reason: to create hierarchy, the first racist idea. Race making is an essential ingredient in the making of racist ideas, the crust that holds the pie. Once a race has been created it must be filled in-and Zurara filled it with negative qualities that would justify Prince Henry’s evangelical mission to the world. This Black race of people was lost, living “like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings, “ Zurara wrote. “They had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in a bestial sloth.”
“The police in the UK are too scared to act in case they are labelled racists. This is what uncontrolled immigration does to societies. It s the same in Europe. The best way to destroy a culture is to make it multicultural.”
“Such proposals may seem impractical and even incredible. But what is truly impractical and incredible is that America, with its enormous wealth, has allowed Watts to become what it is and that a commission empowered to study this explosive situation should come up with answers that boil down to voluntary actions by business and labor, new public relations campaigns for municipal agencies, and information-gathering for housing, fair employment, and welfare departments. The Watts manifesto is a response to realities that the McCone Report is barely beginning to grasp. Like the liberal consensus which it embodies and reflects, the commission s imagination and political intelligence appear paralyzed by the hard facts of Negro deprivation it has unearthed, and it lacks the political will to demand that the vast resources of contemporary America be used to build a genuinely great society that will finally put an end to these deprivations. And what is most impractical and incredible of all is that we may very well continue to teach impoverished, segregated, and ignored Negroes that the only way they can get the ear of America is to rise up in violence.”
“An Immigrant s Plight (The Sonnet) With hopes and dreams brimming in my heart, I have traveled across miles and miles. A single desire for a flame of acceptance, Still burns bright in my heart s aisle. You say home is where the heart is, But my heart is accused of difference. Sometimes I m accused of faith or race, Other times they question my allegiance. Amidst the illusive fog of color and geography, When did humanity cease mattering most! Sentiments and dreams have no borders, Character isn t exclusive to any single coast. We’ve wasted enough time on labels and covers, It s time to be family filling the world with colors.”
“Amidst the illusive fog of color and geography, When did humanity cease mattering most! Sentiments and dreams have no borders, Character isn t exclusive to any single coast.”
“You are a part of me I do not yet know”
“Any psyche, conscious of itself, will revolt against the shape, size or color of the body in which it dwells; this healthy—for that body, in fact, not only reminds the psyche of its mortality, it deprives it of its individuality, binding it to a group. Accordingly, crimes of racial violence outrage not only the victims, but all individuals. Apathy, in this case, is a sad indication that you are not an individual.”
“But for all of that life shaping power, race is a mirage, which doesn t lessen its force. We are what we see ourselves as, whether what we see exists or not. We are what people see us as, whether what they see exists or not. What people see in themselves and others has meaning and manifests itself in ideas and actions in policies even if what they see is an illusion. Race is a mirage, but one that we do well to see, while never forgetting it is a mirage, never forgetting that its the powerful light of racist power that makes the mirage.”
“Considering silence to be nonviolence is a sign of our downfall, not progress.”
“Accepting humans as humans is not inclusion, it s the ultimate emancipation - emancipation from the primitive shackles - emancipation from the savageries of our past - emancipation from the snobbery, egotism and bigotry of our ancestors - emancipation from the goody-goody illusive bounds of cultural, political, religious, intellectual and professional sectarianism.”