“Marie felt a sudden urge to smash the glass, break down the door, pull down the building. She wanted to tear apart the world. Mather would have never treated a white student that badly, nor would he have shut the door in the face of a man. At that moment, she wanted Dr. Mather to disappear. She wanted every white man to disappear. She wanted to burn them all down to ash and feast on their smoke. Hateful, powerful thoughts. She wondered what those hateful, powerful thoughts could create.”
“If you kill a black man, the world is silent. You can hear a garage door opening from twenty blocks away. You can pick up a pay phone and only hear the dial tone. Shooting stars sound exactly like the soft laughter of a little girl in Gasworks Park. If you kill a white man, the world erupts with noise: fireworks, sirens, a gavel pounding a desk, the slamming of doors.”
“Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and watch as others rights are trampled upon.”
“It s illegal to deny people their records due to race or gender. Adoptees deserve the same rights and protections.”
“Reducing a group to a slur or stereotype reduces us all.”
“People often call fighting discrimination being PC because they don t want their own unearned privileges challenged.”
“They called me an Indian pig. Oh, and they called me a prairie n*****. Pretty colorful, enit? I suppose. That one pissed me off, though. I ain t no prairie Indian. I m from a salmon tribe, man. If they were going to insult me, they should ve called me salmon n*****. I m surprised you can laugh about this. It s what Indians do. Weren t you afraid? Yeah, I was afraid, but I m afraid most of the time, you know? How would you feel if a white guy like you got dropped into the middle of a black neighborhood, like Compton, California, on a Saturday night? I d be very afraid. And that s exactly how I feel living in Seattle. Hell, I feel that way living in the United States. Indians are outnumbered, Officer. Those three guys scared me bad, but I ve been scared for a long time.”
“What would be wicked would be to say, I will not give this person a job because he belongs to this category of people, and there s some kind of statistical tendency for this category of person to be different from that category... Treat them as individuals! Look at the qualifications of this individual, and forget about the group, race, whatever you want to call it, to which he belongs.”
“Righteous indignation calls sin what it is. Bigotry is sin. Racism is sin. Oppression is sin. Control by fear is sin. Violence is sin. The quicker we can all admit that, the quicker the healing will begin.”
“What if racism is so perfect, it made you believe the boycotting and peaceful protests of the civil rights movement actually changed policies, but in actuality policies were gonna change anyway. Hell, let them sit whereever they want on the bus. Just don t sit with them. Let them into our schools, the teachers will still teach from a eurocentric curriculum anyway. Let them eat with us, they ll need the energy and strength to build our homes. Racism is a perfect system with an impenetrable barrier.”
“Freedman Town serves a good purpose - not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town s purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say Will you look at those animals? That s what kind of people those people are .”
“If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society.”
“The meetings and marches and vigils are cool, but if the enemy isn t present, you re just talking slick to a can of oil.”
“If you see a group of people struggling over generations and you attribute those struggles to bad character, then you do not truly believe we are all created equally.”
“I know that no matter how liberal or progressive I profess to be, no matter how successfully, how diligently I seek to be enlightened and nuanced in my understanding of the world and those around me, I know that there still is a tiny, virulent nugget, a germ of prejudice that exists deep within me — the product of those stereotypes and awful jokes of childhood and adolescence, and that it must always be powerfully held at bay by reason, understanding and love.”
“Nigeria has divided itself into PDP and APC.The PDP is to go on making mistakes while APC is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”
“The condition of the black race, their pain, their wounds, would in his mind become merged with his own: the absent father and the hint of scandal, a mother who had gone away, the cruelty of other children, the realization that he was no fair-haired boy -- that he looked like a wop . Racism was part of that past, his instincts told him, part of convention and respectability and status, the smirks and whispers and gossip that had kept him on the outside looking in,”