What fragmented individualism really meant was what happened to a black man who tried to make it in this society: in order to succeed, he had to become an imitation white man - dress white, talk white...
However it might go, I should have no regrets. If I should be reduced to begging in the street, then I should enjoy the feel of pavement beneath my feet and the odors of asphalt and automobile exhaust...
We shall remain prisoners of culture unless we become aware of the process and force ourselves to confront it and to deprogram it.
We must return to them their lawful rights, assure equality of justice - and then everybody leave everybody else to hell alone. Paternalistic - we show our prejudice in our paternalism - we downgrade...
The core concept in Griffin’s writings about racism—that members of dominant groups tend to view minorities, because they seem different in some extrinsic way, as intrinsically other, and as merely un...
The Southern Negro will not tell the white man the truth. He long ago learned that if he speaks a truth unpleasing to the white, the white will make life miserable for him. The
Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. Y...
If we could only put ourselves in the shoes of others to see how we would react, then we might become aware of the injustice of discrimination and the tragic inhumanity of every kind of prejudice.
He showed me the lowest. I had to surmise the highest.
A couple of years ago I was seated in an auditorium in Detroit where Reverend Cleage was explaining to a conference of priests that what they called black separatists were in reality men who recognize...
The author explains that some find recourse from injustice in literature and art but that these tend to deepen sensitivity to injustice rather than dull it.
Many otherwise decent men and women could find no other solution. They are willing to degrade themselves to their basest levels to prevent the traditional laborer from rising in status or, to put it b...
Phew! His small blue eyes shone with repugnance, a look of such unreasoning contempt for my skin that it filled me with despair. It was a little thing, but piled on all the other little things it brok...
I knew, and every black man there knew, that I, as a man now white once again, could say the things that needed saying but would be rejected if black men said them.
Newspapers play up as sensational every attempt by a Negro to rape a white woman. Yet this white rape of Negro women is apparently a different matter. But it is rape nonetheless, and practiced on a sc...
My revulsion turned to grief that my own people could give the hate stare, could shrivel men’s souls, could deprive humans of rights they unhesitatingly accord their livestock. I
How can you render the duties of justice to men when they may destroy you?
God is invoked … and He is invoked against the God of the spirit, of intelligence and love - excluding and hating this God. What an extraordinary spiritual phenomenon this is: people believe in God an...
Forgetting myself for a moment, I stopped to study the menu that was elegantly exposed in a show window. I read, realizing that a few days earlier I could have gone in and ordered anything on the menu...
We led strange, hidden lives. We were advocating one thing: that this country rid itself of the racism that prevented some citizens from living as fully functioning men and as a result dehumanized all...