racism-in-america

Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.

Fantasy like thought that no man could rainJust let her reignRun wild with her unafraidOf any rain stormsThey only wash the mud away and make wayFor double rainbows and sunny days

...I fell asleep and had a dream that a king was liquidated by a group of kind faces....

...I fell asleep and had a dream that a king was liquidated by a group of kind faces...

Bigotry and sexism destroy the unity needed for a nation to live.

I am still hoping to see an America that would gradually move beyond race, only in times when old ideas would no longer lives and the new will grow with the young generation.

The races are like America's children. White people are the firstborn, so they were Dad's favorite. Black people are the second kids, the abused ones, so they still hate Dad. Latinos are the third, caught in the middle and always trying to make peace between the other siblings. Asians are the youngest, and get good marks in school, but basically are just trying to keep their heads down and not get involved. And Native Americans are the old uncle who owns a house and everyone else in the family was like, "He's not using that! Let's move in!

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'.

An institution rooted in slavery cannot be the voice of our people.

[whiteness] has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white__atholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish__nd if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury.

There is nothing 'honorable' or 'reasonable' in giving a pass to those who want to discriminate.

It's not 'over-sensitivity' to ask to be treated with the same dignity and respect shown to others.

The textbook in question in the infamous Scope's Monkey Trial was partially written by the Harvard educated white supremacist, Charles B. Davenport.

It might not seem self-evident that impunity for white violence against blacks would engender black-on-black murder. But when people are stripped of legal protection and placed in desperate straits, they are more, not less, likely to turn on each other. Lawless settings are terrifying; if people can do whatever they want to each other, there are always enough bullies to make it ugly. Americans are nostalgic for the village setting and hold dear the notion of community, so the idea that the oppressed do not band together in solidarity is counter to our myths. But community spawns communal justice; the village gives rise to the feud.

People often call fighting discrimination being 'PC' because they don't want their own unearned privileges challenged.

Political correctness_ is a label the privileged often use to distract from their privilege and hate.

What matters most is not 'what' you are, but 'who' you are.

Racism is dead only to those who've closed their eyes and ears to the whole world around them.