Accepted Lewis Black Quotes

I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to a word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, "Let it be understood that by the word 'black' I shall always mean 'white,' and by the word 'white' I shall always mean 'black,'" I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I think it.

Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren’t all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it? Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which will make pain not to be pain. It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on. And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness. One flesh. Or, if you prefer, one ship. The starboard engine has gone. I, the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour. Or rather, till the journey ends. How can I assume a harbour? A lee shore, more likely, a black night, a deafening gale, breakers ahead—and any lights shown from the land probably being waved by wreckers. Such was H.’s landfall. Such was my mother’s. I say their landfalls; not their arrivals.

National coverage of Lewis’s falling-out with SNCC over Black Power was rooted in a white perspective. White Power had been acceptable since Jamestown. Now even the hint of Black Power was denounced as un-American. Citing the Times headline LEWIS QUITS S.N.C.C.; SHUNS BLACK POWER, Good observed, “The headline’s partial truths fitted the rationale of a white society that had tolerated racial injustice for a century, yet denounced ‘black power’ in a day. At the same time, some in the society were paying sentimental homage to the good old days when Negroes faced fire hoses and police dogs with beatific smiles.

Second, there is the attempt by some to justify the rise of the prisons by claiming, “well, we have to do something about those people who fail to act ‘responsibly,’ who, for whatever reason, are ‘disruptive and violent’.” As I consider this kind of response, let us recall that the most “disruptive and violent” in our society are actually the architects of U.S. war and of carceral state terror. Their acts are usually accepted, assumed by public ideologies to be innocent. Moreover, the violations by the rich, as distinct from those by the poor, are often swept under the rug, routinely treated with less harshness, if punished at all. One major example of this is the fact that the most widespread use and distribution of drugs is by whites, even though black and Latinos are punished more for drug use at strikingly higher rates.