“Skeçler yazıp sirk müdürüne götürdüm. Bana, Ne yazık ki zencisiniz. diye cevap verdiler. Kıvırcık saçlarımla, esmer tenimi ne kadar sevdiğimi unutuyorlar halbuki. Hatta zencilerin saçlarını beyazlarınkinden daha muntazam buluyorum. Bizim saçlarımız daha uysaldır, istediğimiz yerde kalır. Beyazlarınki ise en küçük bir baş hareketinde yer değişir.”
“They d run all these tests on him and decided he wasn t racist. He wasn t, either, but not because he thought about it particularly. He just couldn t see the point. It just made for a lot of hassle, being that way, so why be that way? Nobody was going to go back and live where they lived before, were they, and if they did (he vaguely suspected) there wouldn t be any Mongolian barbecue and maybe we d all be listening to Pentecostal Metal and anyway the President was black.”
“If you believe that I m a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.”
“It’s not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys, it’s homophobia. It’s not the color of their skin that makes life harder for people of color; it’s racism. It’s not having vaginas that makes life harder for women, it’s sexism. And it’s ageism, far more than the passage of time, that makes growing older harder for all of us.”
“All social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical, that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have. been tolerated; forgetful that they themselves perhaps tolerate other inequalities under an equally mistaken notion of expediency, the correction of which would make that which they approve seem quite as monstrous as what they have at last learnt to condemn.”
“It neither kills outright nor inflicts apparent physical harm, yet the extent of its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record - and its potential damage to the quality of human life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. Its more conventional name, of course, is dehumanization.”
“For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the riddles of the universe, or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man. Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races. The appeal of both to large masses was so strong that they were able to enlist state support and establish themselves as official national doctrines. But far beyond the boundaries within which race-thinking and class-thinking have developed into obligatory patterns of thought, free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views.”
“Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.”
“You can only rule over a subject race, especially when you are in a small minority, if you honestly believe yourself to be racially superior, and it helps towards this if you can believe that the subject race is biologically different.”
“No matter how much Steve and I preached about staying legal, most of these men never believed us, and some would grin or wink as we spoke. They thought the CKKKK was like the Klan group their grandfathers belonged to back in the 1920 s or 30 s, when members could get by with just about anything. That ignorance about the CKKKK extended to the masses of people as well. I received hundreds of phone calls from people wanting me to go out and assault this or that person, for wrongs perceived by the callers. One 65 year old White man called, and after informing me his wife of 67 had left him and moved in with a younger man, demanded that I get some men together and, as the caller put it, Go Klux em, meaning to commit some violent act upon them. A Black girl from Angier called once, saying her boyfriend was dating a White girl, and asked me, Whut you gone do bout it? Another elderly White lady called and said that her Black maid was stealing her jewelry, as if that was a classic crime for which the CKKKK should render traditional and just Klan punishment. It s really incredible. ”
“The Judge sat in the dining-room amid his morning’s mail, and he did not ask John to sit down. He plunged squarely into the business. “You’ve come for the school, I suppose. Well John, I want to speak to you plainly. You know I’m a friend to your people. I’ve helped you and your family, and would have done more if you hadn’t got the notion of going off. Now I like the colored people, and sympathize with all their reasonable aspirations; but you and I both know, John, that in this country the Negro must remain subordinate, and can never expect to be the equal of white men. In their place, your people can be honest and respectful; and God knows, I’ll do what I can to help them. But when they want to reverse nature, and rule white men, and marry white women, and sit in my parlor, then, by God! we’ll hold them under if we have to lynch every N****r in the land. Now, John, the question is, are you, with your education and Northern notions, going to accept the situation and teach the darkies to be faithful servants and laborers as your fathers were,—I knew your father, John, he belonged to my brother, and he was a good N****r. Well—well, are you going to be like him, or are you going to try to put fool ideas of rising and equality into these folks’ heads, and make them discontented and unhappy?”
“White Privilege DENIERS; Don t you understand that you cannot disprove something that you yourself are the direct evidence of...Why is your identity so hinged on their disparities?”
“Books, art, fashion, history—were these not the things I had been erased from once I was deemed unfit to be a protected member of a state? Don’t we call them the humanities because they are supposedly what make us human, or acceptably human? Was being learned or worldly or talented not the currency that often bought me eye contact and first-name basis with guests and classmates and teachers?”
“All right-wing ideologies have no moral allowance for the hypothetical which means you cannot get moral debate off the ground with someone with a right-wing ideology. Because they have no moral empathy for anyone but themselves and their own false consciousness in their own fascist right-wing ideology. Also known as you cannot debate a moron. But that does not mean that you should not call out their ignorance for what it is. Simply so others will know that those extreme [right-wing] ideologies have never and never will be accepted or welcome in any mainstream democratic society.”
“Michigan is still home to one of the most extreme human containment systems in the United States. Its prison population has increased by 450 percent since 1973, and the state maintains a higher rate of imprisonment than most countries. African Americans are the largest incarcerated group by far in Michigan, with a total population of 14 percent and a penal population of 49 percent. Latinos and Native Americans are incarcerated in Michigan at rates equal to their population percentage. However, white Michiganders, who make up 77 percent of the general population, are underrepresented in the prison population at 46 percent. Racialized sentencing policies have much to do with these statistics. Historians Heather Ann Thompson and Matthew Lassiter, the founding codirectors of the Carceral State Project at the University of Michigan, point to draconian state legislation that by the 1990s included the infamous lifer laws, which exacted life terms for narcotics possessions of over 650 grams and extinguished the opportunity for parole. As men and women were thrown behind bars for nonviolent offenses in the 1980s through the early 2000s, Detroit neighborhoods were gutted, children were orphaned, and voter rolls were depleted.”
“What you are about to read is the story of the first war on terror. No ... wait. This is actually the origin story of second-wave white supremacy known as Jim Crow laws. This is a war narrative. This is a horror story, but it s also a suspense thriller that ends in triumph. It also ends in tragedy. It s a true story about a fantastic myth. This is a narrative, nonfiction account of the all-American fairy tale of liberty and justice for all. Behold, the untold story of the Great American Race War. Before we begin, we shall introduce our hero. The hero of this drama is Black people. All Black people. The free Blacks; the uncloaked maroons; the Black elite; the preachers and reverends; the doormen and doctors; the sharecroppers and soldiers—they are all protagonists in our epic adventure. Spoiler alert: the hero of this story does not die. Ever. This hero is long-suffering but unkillable. Bloody and unbowed. In this story—and in all the subsequent sequels, now and forever—this hero almost never wins. But we still get to be the heroes of all true American stories simply because we are indestructible. Try as they might, we will never be extinguished. Ever.”
“Immigrant. The word carries currency. Loaded. Weighed down by a politics of emotionality. Fear reigns and rules. It shrouds policy and reaches into these borders of manufactured fear where the walls are thick with America s rewritten history of immigration, featuring the accents of bigotry and unapologetic open political warfare turning small screens of news shows into horror movies where caged children are vilified and their proponent, America s forty-fifth president, is deified.”